UT Poetry Center

Freedom House is a poetry collection that explores internal, interpersonal, and systemic freedom. In this debut full-length collection, KB Brookins' formally diverse, music-influenced poetry explores transness, politics of the body, gentrification, sexual violence, climate change, masculinity, and afrofuturism while chronicling their transition and walking readers through different "rooms". The speaker isn't afraid to call themselves out while also bending time, displaying the terror of being Black/queer/trans in Texas, and more -- all while using humor and craft. What does freedom look like? What can we learn from nature and our past? How do you reintroduce yourself in a world that refuses queerness? How can we use poetry as a tool in the toolbox that helps build freedom? This collection explores those questions, and manifests a world where Black, queer, and trans people get to live.

"As KB navigates burning issues of love, identity, race, and enforced gender, bearing witness to how intimacy can be a battleground, a declared truce, or an Eden, How to Identify Yourself with a Wound is never less than compelling and absorbing: 'Let me tell you the story of a tenderness the world refused to call / beautiful but it lives.' The powerful lines, the no-holds-barred voice, and risk-taking candor of these dynamic debut poems make the reader hungry for a whole volume."

Shirley Temple tap dancing at the Kiwanis Club, Stevie Nicks glaring at Lindsey Buckingham during a live version of "Silver Springs," Frank Ocean lyrics staking new territory on the page: this is a taste of the cultural landscape sampled in Your New Feeling is the Artifact of a Bygone Era. Chad Bennett casually combines icons of the way we live now--GIFs, smartphones, YouTube--with a classical lover's lament. The result is certainly a deeply personal account of loss, but morecritically, a dismantling of an American history of queerness. "This is our sorrow. Once it seemed theirs, but now it's ours. They still inhabit it, yet we say it's ours." All at once cerebral, physical, personal, and communal,Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era constructs a future worth celebrating.

Bo Schwabacher's OMMA, SEA OF JOY AND OTHER ASTROLOGICAL SIGNS is a book of equal parts defiance and grief. The Korean adoptee narrator speaks from a place often heavy with silence. Short lines suspended in white space speak to the tenuous grip, the narrow stairs that allow the narrator to contain herself, with great effort. Madness, spiritual cannibalism, and grief are ritualized, even washed here; each poem seems to bleed and then purify what was invoked in the last. These poems are exquisite--spiritual drama inside the charged theater of language."--Sun Yung Shin