Winter of Worship

by Kayleb Rae Candrilli

Overview

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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556596933
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	01/07/2025
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.62(h) x (d)

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.

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.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Winter of Worship

“Candrilli commits to what the title of their new collection implies as they explore the implications of time and seasons. The poems illuminate experiences that are sometimes divine, often devastating, frequently mundane, and singularly perfect. . . . These are poems constructed with a quiet power that produces a revelatory end that somehow cracks open another beginning, 'Not everyone understands my body, but still, it’s here, & believable.'”—Sara Verstynen, Booklist

“Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s latest collection, Winter of Worship, is a collection steeped in grief, compulsively obsessed with time and slowing it, or reorganizing it—making it mappable in such a way that maybe, loss won’t feel so prevalent. Through crisply constructed poems including ghazals, haibuns, and the poet’s invented form, the Marble Run, Candrilli grasps at lost queer futures, knowledge, and innocence. . . . The result is a tenderly felt and beautifully written collection which remembers a lot and wants to record the details of memory before they are lost to time, but which ultimately defers to sensation—the intangible, disoriented, inaccessible aspect of memory.”—Meredith Macleod Davidson, Adroit Journal

“Winter of Worship by Kayleb Rae Candrilli begins liltingly 'It’s a new year, and each oyster I open re-injures / my two-seam shoulder' and, in a later poem, begins again: 'It’s a new decade and a new pandemic is roaring / through the world.' These starts mark aliveness and newness but also the possibility of death, the hereafter, and the life in memory, as 'Ars Poetica' reads: 'When friends // die, I don’t cry until the longhand / elegy.'”—Cindy Juyoung Ok, Poetry Northwest

“A simpler existence is mourned in Winter of Worship, Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s fourth collection filled with hometown memories, linguistic reenactments of youth, and queer observations of domestic moments. . . . The whole collection is an elegy of its own, traversing with a stable, vivid voice the futures, friends, and family lost to passing time.”—Turi Sioson, Only Poems

“These poems, which deal with grief, environmental destruction, transphobia and more, constantly remind us that 'so much still matters.'”—Ron Charles, Washington Post

“Extends the threads of community care to the landscape of Philadelphia’s downtown streets. The poems grieve: for friends lost to the opioid crisis, for youth lost to climate change and the pandemic, for queer history lost to the AIDS epidemic. Yet Candrilli sustains a current of hope underneath, finding connection in the smallest gestures of the everyday. They indulge in the healing power of recursive poetic forms, using the repetitions of ghazals and 'Marble Runs' to transform their surroundings.”—Skylar Mikus, Electric Lit

“Winter of Worship strikes this delicate balance between hope and despair, and yet, here is Kayleb Rae Candrilli, 'whole and sturdy . . . committed to spring.'”—Charles Rammelkamp, The Lake

“Rural, nostalgic, clawing.”—Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine

Praise for Kayleb Rae Candrilli

“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

From the Publisher