All the Gay Saints

Whiting Award winner Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s second full-length book, All the Gay Saints, is a collection of trans joy and resilience. Focused on love, partnership, and cultivating the landscape of one’s own body, All the Gay Saints seeks happiness in a world saturated with transphobia and marred by climate change. Though this world is finite, these poems want you to live forever. They will unbarb your body if you let them.

"All the Gay Saints has a lexicon all its own, one that reveals a devastating and beautiful geography of the body and its futurity. In lines such as, "Asperitas / is the wave that rises before the end / of something that looks most / like the world.." we are offered a new world, or at least the promise of its possibility. In this still-forming world, the body, in all its triumphs and losses, strangenesses and normalcies, in all the yet to be discovered and joyful states of neither, is fully present and visible. The emotional landscape of this process is reiterated as the natural world, as land, atmosphere, touch. "Queer, what you have in your hair is all down feathers, dandelion stems, and / the ways in which you’ve saved me. When we take new names, we give each / other permission." The new names in this book are ones you'll want to read aloud." —Natalie Diaz

Kayleb Rae Candrilli is author of What Runs Over with YesYes Books, which was a 2017 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in transgender poetry. They are also author of All the Gay Saints, winner of the 2018 Saturnalia Book Contest and forthcoming in 2020. Candrilli is published or forthcoming in TriQuarterly Review, Boston Review, Bettering American Poetry, and many others. They serve as an assistant poetry editor for BOAAT Press and hold an MFA and an MLIS from the University of Alabama. They live in Philadelphia with their partner.