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Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize. Laurentiis is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. More about this author >
In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives. This irreverent, gentle, and erotic book is a record of that ten-year journey. It draws on, expands, and then fractures the many poetic traditions which informed Laurentiis’s poetics—from Greek odes and early Black Spirituals to the work of Whitman and Dickinson and the mid-century cinematic icon The Lady Chablis.
Then, brick by brick, she builds them anew and makes them her own. She maps a path onto the contradictions, precarity, and revelry of her hometown. With this as her frame, Laurentiis meditates on what it means to be trans and Black in this nation and in her own body, when both demarcations are often excuses for violence. She goes further, examining pleasure and deep-felt pain, in a rhythmic, wild embrace of life, an act of spirit work and self-grace.
