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.”
ISBN: 9781556596933
Format: Paperback
Reviews
“These poems, which deal with grief, environmental destruction, transphobia and more, constantly remind us that ‘so much still matters.'”—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s latest collection, Winter of Worship, is a collection steeped in grief, compulsively obsessed with time and slowing it, or reorganizing it—making it mappable in such a way that maybe, loss won’t feel so prevalent. Through crisply constructed poems including ghazals, haibuns, and the poet’s invented form, the Marble Run, Candrilli grasps at lost queer futures, knowledge, and innocence. . . . The result is a tenderly felt and beautifully written collection which remembers a lot and wants to record the details of memory before they are lost to time, but which ultimately defers to sensation—the intangible, disoriented, inaccessible aspect of memory.”—Meredith Macleod Davidson, Adroit Journal
“Candrilli commits to what the title of their new collection implies as they explore the implications of time and seasons. The poems illuminate experiences that are sometimes divine, often devastating, frequently mundane, and singularly perfect. . . . These are poems constructed with a quiet power that produces a revelatory end that somehow cracks open another beginning, ‘Not everyone understands my body, but still, it’s here, & believable.'”—Sara Verstynen, Booklist
“Winter of Worship by Kayleb Rae Candrilli begins liltingly ‘It’s a new year, and each oyster I open re-injures / my two-seam shoulder’ and, in a later poem, begins again: ‘It’s a new decade and a new pandemic is roaring / through the world.’ These starts mark aliveness and newness but also the possibility of death, the hereafter, and the life in memory, as ‘Ars Poetica’ reads: ‘When friends // die, I don’t cry until the longhand / elegy.'”—Cindy Juyoung Ok, Poetry Northwest
“Extends the threads of community care to the landscape of Philadelphia’s downtown streets. The poems grieve: for friends lost to the opioid crisis, for youth lost to climate change and the pandemic, for queer history lost to the AIDS epidemic. Yet Candrilli sustains a current of hope underneath, finding connection in the smallest gestures of the everyday. They indulge in the healing power of recursive poetic forms, using the repetitions of ghazals and ‘Marble Runs’ to transform their surroundings.”—Skylar Mikus, Electric Lit
“A simpler existence is mourned in Winter of Worship, Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s fourth collection filled with hometown memories, linguistic reenactments of youth, and queer observations of domestic moments. . . . The whole collection is an elegy of its own, traversing with a stable, vivid voice the futures, friends, and family lost to passing time.”—Turi Sioson, Only Poems
“Winter of Worship strikes this delicate balance between hope and despair, and yet, here is Kayleb Rae Candrilli, ‘whole and sturdy . . . committed to spring.'”—Charles Rammelkamp, The Lake