A portrait through poetry of a trans person’s experience, Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s Water I Won’t Touch runs powerful, emotion-laden language through moments of trauma, tenderness and joy. Candrilli’s accolades—as a 2019 Whiting Award Winner in poetry, a 2017 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in transgender poetry, and many more—are deserved, and this latest 96-page book further reveals their distinct, necessary voice.
Franny Choi explores queerness, femininity, identity and autonomy as an Asian American woman in Soft Science, a book of poems that often center on futurism and technology in a remarkably human manner. While cyborgs feature as a vehicle for otherness, Choi also uses them in many other nuanced ways. Rhythmic and melodic, her poems enthrall readers.
Love and Other Poems, the third collection from award-winning poet Alex Dimitrov, provides readers moments of reflection and wit, weakness and joy. Through his intimate, thoughtful and emotive lines, Dimitrov explores loneliness and hope, the sensations of time and longing for place—with repeat references to NYC and the power of presence it wields. Though Dimitrov’s paperback book is finite, one of the poems within is …
