Cover Art: Yutha Adiputra Yamanaka
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback, 97 pages
Dec 2017, ISBN 978-1-936919-35-2
Winner, Pamet River Prize!
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry!
Kayleb Rae Candrilli is a 2019 Whiting Award winner in Poetry!
Interview with Kayleb Rae Candrilli by Stephanie Trott at The Rumpus
"When Roethke said 'energy is the soul of poetry,' he might have been anticipating a book like What Runs Over, which is so full of energy it practically vibrates in your hand. Here, Candrilli’s speaker sticks their tongue 'into the heads / of venus fly traps just to feel the bite,' then later, burns holy books in the backyard and rolls around in the ashes until they become 'a painted god.' This is the verve of an urgent new poetic voice announcing itself to the world. As Candrilli writes: 'This is what I look like / when I’m trying to save myself.'"
-Kaveh Akbar
about Kayleb Rae Candrilli
Kayleb Rae Candrilli is a 2019 Whiting Award Winner in Poetry and the author of What Runs Over with YesYes Books, which was a 2017 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in transgender poetry. Their second collection, All the Gay Saints, won the 2018 Saturnalia Book Contest and is forthcoming in Spring 2020. Candrilli is published or forthcoming in POETRY, TriQuarterly Review, Academy of American Poets, Boston Review and many others.
What Runs Over by Kayleb Rae Candrilli
from What Runs Over
the hair mounding between my legs
makes me dwell on my lycanthropy
i black out and remember nothing
of what the neighbor boys leave
tangled there // candy wrappers fool’s
gold the silver head of a cotton mouth
their blood and mine // sperm that isn’t
yet sperm and so it’s un-listable
i imagine myself in this black lapse
(all wolf) falsely lustful and gnashing
i want to eat them wholly
and wake up as what I eat
About What Runs Over
Born from the isolation of rural Pennsylvania, a life of homeschooling, and physiological and physical domestic abuse, What Runs Over, a memoir in verse, paints “the mountain” in excruciating detail. In a sequence of vignettes, What Runs Over, is a book length nonlinear narrative of a rural life. The whole created is a world of canned peaches, of Borax-cured bear hides, of urine filled Gatorade bottles, of the syringe and all the syringe may carry. What Runs Over is a world of violence and its many personas. It is a story of rural queerness, of a transgender boy almost lost to the forest forever.
