Orders of Service

by Willie Lee Kinard III

Overview

As a young, Black, queer person in a small town in the South where everyone knows everyone, Orders of Service is a coming-of-age exploration of the everyday fever of fleeting relationships, while capturing the romantic, psychic quotidian of the Bible Belt. This commentary on gospel traditionalism is armed with dreams of helping to reshape lived realities where being your truest self could be shunned or ostracized in deeply religious communities. It ruminates on this Deep South narrative by exploring how the age of social media has created a rich underground counterculture that offsets the surface rituals of grief and shame. The poems illuminate lineages of performance and fellowship for queer descendants of the last Black folks out of the Carolina cotton fields, and features Anansi-like speakers (Anansi is a trickster spider featured in West African and Caribbean folklore) while delving into old-school sensibilities and advice. This gospel-fugue bends language in the backwoods of faith and desire. Pulling figures from the stories of childhood—Icarus, a flying boy wanting to escape; Asterion the Minotaur—the wandering son of someone absent; Medusa, a wronged person portrayed as a mankiller; Cerberus, a beastly guardian intent on being a “good” boy— these poems are punky, preachy, prissy, and pink-collar, and all help create the fever-dream that is Orders of Service.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949944570
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	11/14/2023
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Willie Lee Kinard III (he/they) is a Black nonbinary poet, designer, educator & musician forged in Newberry, South Carolina. With written work appearing or forthcoming in Obsidian, Best New Poets, Boston Review, POETRY, The Rumpus, and elsewhere, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh and has received fellowships and support from The Watering Hole & The Pittsburgh Foundation. An avid believer in evening thunderstorms & loose-leaf tea, go see ‘bout them at www.williekinard.com.

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/18/2023

Kinard’s ambitious debut weaves disparate elements to create a textured consideration of queer Black identity in the deep South. Drawing on a diverse array of mythological figures from African and Western traditions as well as Black- and Southern-inflected Christian ritual, Kinard’s poems form an intricate cosmology that transcends the personal to reflect on a close-knit, complex community. In “What We Wayward Do,” the poet uses the pluralized voice to great effect, highlighting the sexual power of those on the margins: “Casting is what they call the girls putting in work/ ’round here & yes, we witches are fishermen,/ whip glamours in men’s overalls/ so long as fish rise to the surface/ mere hours before morning’s stilettos.” The poems delight in the lyricism of the body and capture the region’s seductive qualities: “This swamp, a ripe heat,/ one crushed bud of lavender under my tongue,/ one degree over peppermint & I am trying to impress.” Placing themselves within a larger conversation and community of Black poetry, the poems use homage and pastiche to convey how “caring begins in the language.” This praiseworthy offering invites reader to share in the magic of linguistic play. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Winner of the 2022 Alice James Award
Shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize
A Finalist in the 2024 Maine Literary Awards for Excellence in Publishing

“Kinard’s ambitious debut weaves disparate elements to create a textured consideration of queer Black identity in the deep South. … This praiseworthy offering invites readers to share in the magic of linguistic play.”
—Publishers Weekly Starred Review

“After reading this collection, we have been gifted a new name: with this silk-spun debut, Willie Lee Kinard III has named a new model of form within and across the literary landscape. I say my own name, and from the sounding emerges the promise of being back in my body.”

—Daniella Toosie-Watson, The Cincinnati Review

“Orders of Service is a tremendous debut, and Kinard quickly signals himself as a skilled practitioner of voice and textuality. This is a collection you will want to read and read again.”
—Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question

“an explosive debut that deals in sonic aftershocks lit up by wit and homage.”
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Harriet Books

“Orders of Service is at once music populating a sermon, a body gone stone after intercourse, and the queering bravado of a choir. Willie Lee Kinard III has a sultry way with the poem as he makes and re-makes it, bringing to the fore “a happy / kind of / blue,” a blue like being country, sweet, and in a kind of fragmented prayer. How do we get to love?, the poems ask, complicating that prayer. This book is as fierce and rich as the rigorous linguistic play that makes Orders of Service already Kinardian.”

—Dawn Lundy Martin 

“A Willie Lee Kinard III poem is a fountain of sound and syntax sprung from a river in South Carolina. A Willie Lee Kinard III poem can teach you how to scream properly and how to change a tire in Babel. It displays the sensual fevers of Jean Toomer and the vernacular lucidity of Alice Walker. A Willie Lee Kinard III poem has room for Mariah Carey, Cesária Évora, SWV, the BeeGees and James Cleveland. It vibrates like a gospel-fugue sung by a chorus of fireflies. Orders of Service is a collection of Kinard’s spells, erasures, lavender linguistics; it’s a score of swerving feels and scriptures. These poems will inspire you to write or give up writing altogether. Orders of Service is a masterful, magical debut.”

—Terrance Hayes, So To Speak

“Willie Lee Kinard III’s astonishing debut collection braids mythology, sex and desire, gutbucket and gospel—defying outdated notions of bodies, binaries, the black church, and the natural world. These verses render testimonies so electric, you can’t help but shout. Kinard knows caring begins in language. He knows black boys crafted of fable can become sharp-witted and tender lovers and loving men. Orders of Service cuts so clean and deep you’ll find yourself several pages in before you notice blood on your fingers.”

—Yona Harvey

From the Publisher