A Boy in the City

(Paperback)

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In this debut collection of poetry, the obscure and mundane collide, a fricassee of movement, the cosmopolitan, and intimacy.

A Boy in the City uses poems as pillars to interrupt and excavate an interiority that unfolds and interrogates grim thoughts and intimacy. Yarberry weaves a sexy, glitzy journey through their city, where the speaker can pose and compose in a trans way, of course. Clever in its playful allusions to Greek myths, William Blake, and other literary figures, A Boy in the City is a distinct work of joy and liberation that reckons with the language of gender and desire.

Reviews

"'I want a stupendous smugness, and the self,' this debut poetry collection by S. Yarberrydeclares, 'to dispense its terrible truth.' Terrible, as interrificandterrifying, is one bodymeeting another, knowledge bending toward doubt, and that which we fear beingexactly what we want . . . Yarberry changes the worldstreetlights are city-tulips, thesoul is a slippery fishto create a new world, to ask, 'How do you see me anyways' Inthese poems, where gender, desire, love, and the struggle to say what cant be said converge, this inquiry offers us a seductive new mind at work. 'I can become anything,'this collection proclaims. 'I did.' And Yarberrys gift to us is that we can become anything, too." Paul Tran, author of All the Flowers Kneeling

"'Trans is Latin for across,' states the title of the final poem in S. YarberrysA Boyin the City, a book in which Yarberry builds poems from a heady mix of eros, violence, tenderness, and the Blakean ecstatic, poems that seek to bring connectionbetween parts, to give wholeness to the fragmentation that, for Yarberry, can cometo define trans life: 'Its as if/only/when in pieces/I find/myself again.'A Boy inthe Cityargues for a way across and through, past the 'festoonery' of gender and easybinaries, toward a hard-won understanding that 'it is nothing special'should in factbe a given'to not want to be hurt.' Yarberrys is a defiant new voice."Carl Phillips,author ofPale Colors in a Tall Field

"A Boy in the Cityis a remarkable collection of poemsincisive, erotic, artfully antiromantic. The poems act as a transcript of a brilliant mind reasoning with itself. Remembered scenes get reenacted against changing backdrops inside a stage-lit braincasestreet, bedroom, seashore (I watched the ocean rise up on its miraculous haunches). Over time, it becomes clear: the issue is not self-discovery, or so-called "becoming. We are born knowing who we areThe world flexed, and I was flown / my body aching, / for the anatomy of boyhood. After the flight, all that is left is the work of achieving the wishes we were given."Mary Jo Bang, author of A Doll for Throwing

Author Bio

S. Yarberry is a trans poet and writer. Their poetry has appeared in Tin House, Indiana Review, The Offing, Berkeley Poetry Review, jubilat, Notre Dame Review, The Boiler, miscellaneous zines, among others. Their other writings can be found in Bomb Magazine, The Adroit Journal, andBlake/An Illustrated Quarterly. They currently serve as the Poetry Editor of The Spectacle. S. has their MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and is now a PhD candidate in literature at Northwestern University.