Water I Won't Touch, Paperback

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.

About author(s):Kayleb Rae Candrilli is a 2019 Whiting Award Winner in poetry and the author of Water I Won't Touch (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), All the Gay Saints (Saturnalia, 2020), and What Runs Over (YesYes Books, 2017). Candrilli was a 2017 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in transgender poetry and a 2017 finalist for the American Book Fest's Best Book Award in LGBTQ Non-Fiction. They have received fellowships from Lambda Literary and are published or forthcoming in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, American Poets, TriQuarterly, Boston Review and many others. They live in Philadelphia with their partner.