Winter of Worship

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.＂

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.