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"Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love"--
Table des matières
Contents
Nostalgia XXX
For Missy Who Never Got His New Name XXX
Family of Origin Content Warning XXX
Tupelo, MS XXX
Boombox Ode XXX
A Medium Performs Your Visit XXX
fifth position (intrusive thoughts at ballet camp) XXX
M., XXX
Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Living Body XXX
Anti Elegy XXX
1987 XXX
Gospel for Missy During Our Three-Day Birthday Season XXX
Sleeping Beauty XXX
Christ the Rural Queer XXX
Fairy Tale Prologue XXX
Family of Origin Rewrite XXX
god XXX
Mississippi, Missing, Missy, Miss— XXX
Second Position (Home Practice) XXX
Jane XXX
a mother’s advice XXX
Body Mark XXX
Who Is This Grief For? XXX
[Boy] Meets Girl 40 XXX
Fantasy with No Secrets XXX
Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco XXX
Fantasy in Which There Was Nothing for Us to Survive XXX
April 25, 2020 XXX
[Boy] Meets Them XXX
My Ghost Asks What the 2020s Are Like XXX
Because You Can’t XXX
A propos de l'auteur
K. Iver is a nonbinary trans poet from Mississippi. Their poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in
Boston Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, BOAAT, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. They have a PhD in poetry from Florida State University.
They are the 2021–2022 Ronald Wallace Fellow for Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.
Résumé
Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love.
In small-town Mississippi, before the aughts, a child “assigned ‘woman’” and a boy “forced to call / himself a girl” love one another—from afar, behind closed doors, in motels. The child survives an injurious mother and the beast-shaped men she brings home; the boy becomes a soldier. Years later, the boy—the eponymous beloved, Missy—dies by suicide, kicking up a riptide of memory. This is where K. Iver writes, at the confluence of love poem and elegy.
“I say to the water if you were here, / you’d be here.” With cinematic precision, they conjure dorm-room landlines, the lingering sweetness of shared candy, a ballet strap and “soft / fingers tracing it, afraid to touch / the skin.” They punctuate depictions of familial abuse and the cruel politics of the Deep South with fairy tales: a girl who endures abuse refusing to grow into a mother who inflicts it herself, queer youth kissing fearlessly, bodies transcending the violence of a reductive gender binary. In these fantasies, “there’s no / reason to leave town no hidden / torches waiting for us to fall asleep.”
Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco sees us through a particular kind of grief—one so relentless, it’s precious. It presses us, also, to continue advocating for a world in which queer love fantasies become reality and queer love poems “swaddle the impossible / contours of joy.”
Préface
Galley campaign, with galleys available for literary media, poetry media, regional (Mississippi, Wisconsin, and New Mexico) media, select booksellers and librarians; digital galleys available for download on Edelweiss
Media outreach, positioning this as an exciting new voice in queer poetry
Bookseller and librarian galley outreach, targeting regional stores
Newsletter promotion via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 30,000 contacts
Preorder promotion at the Association of Writers & Publishers 2023 conference
Advertising with Academy of American Poets
Major launch event to celebrate Prize in Minneapolis, events in Mississippi
