Kayleb Rae Candrilli

Both radically tender and desperate for change, Water I Won't Touch is a life raft and a self-portrait, concerned with the vitality of trans people living in a dangerous and inhospitable landscape. Through the brambles of the Pennsylvania forest to a stretch of the Jersey Shore, in quiet moments and violent memories, Kayleb Rae Candrilli touches the broken earth and examines the whole in its parts. Written during the body's healing from a double mastectomy--in the wake of addiction and family dysfunction--these ambitious poems put new form to what's been lost and gained. Candrilli ultimately imagines a joyful, queer future: a garden to harvest, lasting love, the insistent flamboyance of citrus.

Water I Won't Touch

Lindsay

-"MY PARTNER WANTS ME TO WRITE THEM A POEM ABOUT DREW BARRYMORE"

but what do I know about love, or about soil, besides how they both feel just the same in my mouth.

-"MY PARTNER WANTS ME TO WRITE THEM A POEM ABOUT SHERYL CROW"

Over time, I’ve learned that love is most astonishing

when it persists after learning where we come from.

-"TRANSGENDER HEROIC: ALL THIS RIDICULOUS FLESH"

I promise the sunrise can still feel sweet.

if the building is standing. They remind me,

have hurt us, have taught us. What a sweet

Water I Won't Touch quotes

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