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Overview
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.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781556596933 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Copper Canyon Press |
| Publication date: | 01/07/2025 |
| Pages: | 96 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.12(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
from GHAZALS CONNECTED AS THOUGH CARGO FREIGHTS
I.
As a child, my mother boosted me into a dumpster of damp discarded library books. I fished out
limericks, and Langston Hughes, and stack after stack of Hardy Boys. Years later, when I came out
to my mother, behind a closed door, I cried like a wolf. I didn’t know it then, but there are queers all over
every forest, tucked in hunting blinds, hands huddled around portable propane heaters. Their hideout:
camouflage and venison jerky traded around like love letters. But even Pennsylvania folk in love are taken
by windstorms. When I say wind, I mean debris, and when I say debris, I mean the Oxy scripts handed out
once every two weeks, by a doctor in each and every county. I remember those car rides with my father—
me and my sister sweating in the back, asking for Burger King, or to turn up U2’s Beautiful Day, or to get out
and stretch in the Salvation Army parking lot. My father was named after his father, and his father named
after his. Peter, from Latin for stone. Too stoned and swerving. Every headlight on this backroad is burnt out.
ELEGY FOR THE NOT YET DEAD RAINFOREST CAFE
It’s a wild place, yes, but birthday parties are still thrown
and candles are still blown out, and thin streams of smoke
drift up into the cloudy, thundering ceiling. All most kids
ever wanted was a middle-class dinner out, with crayons
and spider monkeys swinging from the rafters. In Atlantic
City, as my partner and I order Cheetah Ritas and eat stale
nachos—on our one weekend vacation a year—I wonder
who will bankrupt first, the Olive Garden down the road
from my mother’s little pink house, or every rainforest
in the world. There is only so much oxygen to go around
and I wish I could explain to my dog why he doesn’t have
a yard, and why he’s on a leash, and why I cry in the winter,
when it isn’t cold at all and it should be. There is so much
that needs explaining; like how, in some forests, the trees
grow so as to never touch one another—the canopy’s
crown spinning a very shy web, but a web nonetheless.