Description
Steeped in loss--of climate and childhood, of fathers and friends--Winter of Worship finds survival in our tender human connections.
Told through an ever-queer lens, Kayleb Rae Candrilli's fourth collection, Winter of Worship, is a patchwork of the pastoral and the "litter swirled around us"--a pandemic, global warming, a hometown hit by storms of fentanyl and Oxycontin scripts. A book of elegy told in ghazals, "Marble Runs," and other forms, these poems reckon with loss: of climate, of fathers, of youth. Candrilli writes, "We are so young / to know so much about life without / our friends." Steeped in the grief of these losses, Winter of Worship finds healing in the smallest memories: Nokia phone cases, jalapeño gardens, pop flys, 67 Dodge darts, YouTube mixes "all electronica and / glitch step." We also find survival in our tender human connections: an iPod tucked into the jacket pocket of a drifter, a kiss pressed to a partner's forehead, a mother calling her child by their chosen name. From the cornfields of Pennsylvania to the streets of downtown Brooklyn, these poems refuse to forget, refuse to lose "an ounce of gentleness."
About the Author
Kayleb Rae Candrilli (they/them) is the author of Winter of Worship (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Water I Won't Touch (Copper Canyon, 2021), All the Gay Saints (Saturnalia 2020), which won the Saturnalia Book Prize, and What Runs Over (YesYes Books, 2017), which was a Lambda Literary finalist for Transgender Poetry. They are the recipient of a Whiting Award and of a PEW Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Candrilli has served as the nonfiction editor of the Black Warrior Review and as a feature editor for NANO Fiction. They served as Assistant Poetry Editor for Boaat Press from 2017 to 2018. They grew up in rural Pennsylvania and currently live in Philadelphia with their partner.
Reviews
"What is innovative about Candrilli's narrative of transness is their insistence that it does not disavow the complicated lessons of gender receive from a cis-normative society. Instead, transness subsumes them within its broader poetics of embodiment." --Broad Street Review"Candrilli's poems skillfully delve into -- amid much else -- what it means to be alive on this damaged earth. They precisely interrogate what happens when human interactions poison -- or "touch" -- something formerly unadulterated." --Los Angeles Review of Books"Intentionally or unintentionally, a text responds by default to conversations of its moment, and the conversation centering trans and nonbinary communities is a high stakes one. Candrilli's book refuses narratives that depict tragic victims for cis consumption. The book doesn't, however, ignore wounds. In doing so, it acknowledges that 'we can hold / just about everything inside of us, whether we want to or not.' This book hopes to break your heart. It also hopes to show you its own: full, tender, and 'simple, again.'" --Pleiades Magazine"The most miraculous part of Candrilli's poetry is it nearly always arrives at an unexpected end, or at an unexpected absence of one."--New York Journal of Books"When I read Water I Won't Touch, I dog-eared many pages, underlined many lines. Candrilli's poems are intimate, nimble, glinting with tenderness and an astonishing lyricism. The physicality of violence electrifies memory, a refusal to conform and the euphoria of love sweetens the future. Language this good, this deftly composed fills me with gratitude. Candrilli is a fearless and brilliant poet." --Eduardo C. Corral
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