Short Film Starring My Beloveds Red Bronco: Poems

(Paperback)

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Short Film Starring My Beloveds Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry,is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love.

In small-town Mississippi, before the aughts, a child assigned woman and a boy forced to call / himself a girl love one anotherfrom afar, behind closed doors, in motels. The child survives an injurious mother and the beast-shaped men she brings home; the boy becomes a soldier. Years later, the boythe eponymous beloved, Missydies by suicide, kicking up a riptide of memory. This is where K. Iver writes, at the confluence of love poem and elegy.

I say to the water if you were here, / youd be here. With cinematic precision, they conjure dorm-room landlines, the lingering sweetness of shared candy, a ballet strap and soft / fingers tracing it, afraid to touch / the skin. They punctuate depictions of familial abuse and the cruel politics of the Deep South with fairy tales: a girl who endures abuse refusing to grow into a mother who inflicts it herself, queer youth kissing fearlessly, bodies transcending the violence of a reductive gender binary. In these fantasies, theres no / reason to leave town no hidden / torches waiting for us to fall asleep.

Short Film Starring My Beloveds Red Bronco sees us through a particular kind of griefone so relentless, its precious. It presses us, also, to continue advocating for a world in which queer love fantasies become reality and queer love poems swaddle the impossible / contours of joy.

Reviews

Praise for Short Film Starring My Beloveds Red Bronco

Ivers fierce, sad debut collection offers a queer coming-of-age story and an elegy for the speakers beloved, a trans man from Mississippi who killed himself at 27. The book embraces the fluidity of language and gender alike.New York Times

"A gripping debut . . . an elegiac coming of age story . . . . The most beautiful moments in this collection are of celebration, as when the two lovers, kept apart against their will, play the radio on boomboxes over a landline"Poetry Foundations Harriet Books

Ivers poems acknowledge the limits of their own fantasizing, they adamantly support the vitality of trans realityIn this entanglement of transness and elegy, reality and fantasy intertwine to assess the transformative power of desire and its limits.Megan Milks, Poetry Foundation

Short Film Starring My Beloveds Red Bronco is one of the most

powerful excavations of grief in recent memory, a genderqueer kaddish that veers from guilt (I have a body / and you dont) to despair to tenderness to searing anger... Ivers poems will turn you inside out.Jonathan Miles, Garden and Gun

K. Ivers debut collection, Short Film Starring My Beloveds Red Bronco is a book of living-through. Here the elegy is not embodied as form but as mode: the death of a loved one is not a subject but an experience that resists conclusion and shapes the perspective of all experiences thereafter. C.T. Salazar, RHINO Magazine

[Short Film Starring My Beloveds Red Bronco] is both elegiac and celebratory, a fierce love song about queer resilience, as well a mourning song about familial abuse and the violence inherent in the gender binary.Laura Sackton, Book Riot

The poems are truly in a league of their own; Ive never read another book like this one. Such a magnetically raw exploration of grief is a giftand a comfort, to those who seek it.Jami Padgett, Arkansas International

K. Iver'sShort Film Starring My Beloved's RedBroncois a gleaming counter-narrative of gender, place, and class. Framed by grief and longing, the poet's vivid and eclectic imagination sprawls through each poem, wrestling with mortality and ideas of transgression. The versatility of images, and the bright energy that pervades and suffuses this work, is a triumph.Tyehimba Jess

What happens to our present when we hold ourselves in the past K. Ivers debut collection, Short Film Starring My Beloveds Red Bronco, is a beautiful and heartbreaking answer. Reading these poems is like watching a dancer analyze their performance repeatedly on a big TV, pausing to circle mistakes with a red markerThis is where I go wronguntil the marker coats the entirety of the screen. Grief colors everythingand still Iver fights to bring joy to the surface. You need to read this book; youve been waiting for it your whole life.Paige Lewis

Short Film Starring My Beloveds Red Bronco is equal parts extended elegy and origin story; in these poems, celebration and lament collide to form a complicated portrait of queer grief and how we survive in the aftermath of loss. Iver refuses to offer up a simple and consumable trans narrative, instead making visible all the pain and joy and mess our lives contain. As much as this collection inhabits the fact of their beloveds death, it also tries to write a future for both of them beyond ittheir poetic imagination its own kind of mourning. In poem after poem, Iver insists on the tangibility and persistence of grief. I am inconsolable, they write. Every day a new definition / of inconsolable.torrin a. greathouse

K. Ivers debut poetry collection, Short Film Starring My Beloveds Red Bronco, brought me to my knees: in clumsy prayer, in imperfect grief, in an earnest and stumbling joy. In these stunning poems, Iver animates an imagined world of less pain, more softness, more gold hair canopying, more bodies shucked to bareness. Our grief as queers has always been collective and deepand yet we are always finding new ways to hold one another. These poems are what I need and what holds me. This book is what I always needed. Ivers work is a gift Ive long begged for, and just now received.Kayleb Rae Candrilli

Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco, is a tender examination of the intricacies of grief, love, gender, and the lasting impressions of deep human connection. This collection is artfully stitched together through its depiction of the relationship between the speaker and their beloved.Marissa Ahmadkhan, West Review

Author Bio

K. Iver is a nonbinary trans poet from Mississippi. Their poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, BOAAT, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. They have a PhD in poetry from Florida State University. They are the 20212022 Ronald Wallace Fellow for Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.