Bad Forecast

by Steffan Triplett

BAD FORECAST is a hybrid memoir told in lyric and fractured prose, depicting grief not just in the aftermath of a tornado in southwest Missouri, but in all that is unearthed from the grounds of adolescence and young adulthood. The book explores the overlaps in the way we talk and think about weather, about queerness, about their disruptions, their pervasive pull, the isolation they can leave behind. What secrets are kept in the climate of Middle America? What spirals out after a storm? How do race and queerness, like the weather, inform a landscape? Bad Forecast considers how we interpret the forecasts that linger behind us and those still projected to come, brewing in the distance.

STEFFAN TRIPLETT is a Black, queer writer raised in Joplin, Missouri and the author of the nonfiction chapbook Constraints (New Michigan Press, 2024). His essays and nonfiction appear in The Iowa Review, Fence, Lit Hub, Vulture, and Electric Literature, and have most recently been anthologized in It Came From the Queer Reflections on Horror (Feminist Press, 2022). He is the Managing Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) and a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Triplett has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Outpost, Lambda Literary, and the National Book Critics Circle.

Genres: Poetry

122 pages, Paperback

Published September 30, 2024

Reviews

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Other than growing impatient with the "combinatorial" piece at the end (but that's my usual reaction to this sort of poem, and doesn't have much to do with the poet's tackling of it), I really enjoyed this collection, though "enjoyed" doesn't seem appropriate when reading about so much loss.