Winter of Worship - Softcover

Candrilli, Kayleb Rae

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556596936 ISBN 13: 9781556596933

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2025

Synopsis

Steeped in loss—of climate and childhood, of fathers and friends—Winter of Worship finds survival in our tender human connections.

Told through an ever-queer lens, Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s fourth collection, Winter of Worship, is a patchwork of the pastoral and the “litter swirled around us”—a pandemic, global warming, a hometown hit by storms of fentanyl and Oxycontin scripts. A book of elegy told in ghazals, “Marble Runs,” and other forms, these poems reckon with loss: of climate, of fathers, of youth. Candrilli writes, “We are so young / to know so much about life without / our friends.” Steeped in the grief of these losses, Winter of Worship finds healing in the smallest memories: Nokia phone cases, jalapeño gardens, pop flys, 67 Dodge darts, YouTube mixes “all electronica and / glitch step.” We also find survival in our tender human connections: an iPod tucked into the jacket pocket of a drifter, a kiss pressed to a partner’s forehead, a mother calling her child by their chosen name. From the cornfields of Pennsylvania to the streets of downtown Brooklyn, these poems refuse to forget, refuse to lose “an ounce of gentleness.”

About this title

About the Author

Kayleb Rae Candrilli (they/them) is the author of Winter of Worship (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Water I Won't Touch (Copper Canyon, 2021), All the Gay Saints (Saturnalia 2020), which won the Saturnalia Book Prize, and What Runs Over (YesYes Books, 2017), which was a Lambda Literary finalist for Transgender Poetry. They are the recipient of a Whiting Award and of a PEW Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Candrilli has served as the nonfiction editor of the Black Warrior Review and as a feature editor for NANO Fiction. They served as Assistant Poetry Editor for Boaat Press from 2017 to 2018. They grew up in rural Pennsylvania and currently live in Philadelphia with their partner.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

from GHAZALS CONNECTED AS THOUGH CARGO FREIGHTS

I.

As a child, my mother boosted me into a dumpster of damp discarded library books. I fished out

limericks, and Langston Hughes, and stack after stack of Hardy Boys. Years later, when I came out

to my mother, behind a closed door, I cried like a wolf. I didn’t know it then, but there are queers all over

every forest, tucked in hunting blinds, hands huddled around portable propane heaters. Their hideout:

camouflage and venison jerky traded around like love letters. But even Pennsylvania folk in love are taken

by windstorms. When I say wind, I mean debris, and when I say debris, I mean the Oxy scripts handed out

once every two weeks, by a doctor in each and every county. I remember those car rides with my father—

me and my sister sweating in the back, asking for Burger King, or to turn up U2’s Beautiful Day, or to get out

and stretch in the Salvation Army parking lot. My father was named after his father, and his father named

after his. Peter, from Latin for stone. Too stoned and swerving. Every headlight on this backroad is burnt out.

ELEGY FOR THE NOT YET DEAD RAINFOREST CAFE

It’s a wild place, yes, but birthday parties are still thrown

and candles are still blown out, and thin streams of smoke

drift up into the cloudy, thundering ceiling. All most kids

ever wanted was a middle-class dinner out, with crayons

and spider monkeys swinging from the rafters. In Atlantic

City, as my partner and I order Cheetah Ritas and eat stale

nachos—on our one weekend vacation a year—I wonder

who will bankrupt first, the Olive Garden down the road

from my mother’s little pink house, or every rainforest

in the world. There is only so much oxygen to go around

and I wish I could explain to my dog why he doesn’t have

a yard, and why he’s on a leash, and why I cry in the winter,

when it isn’t cold at all and it should be. There is so much

that needs explaining; like how, in some forests, the trees

grow so as to never touch one another—the canopy’s

crown spinning a very shy web, but a web nonetheless.

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556596936
• ISBN 13: 9781556596933
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88