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they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming
Winner of the 2025 Joe W. Bratcher Prize
they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming by dezireé a. brown is a momentous debut, tracking a self-proclaimed antihero’s quest for liberation via the transformative ritual of writing through the past, present, and future. Influenced by video game worlds, choose-your-own adventures, and a multifaceted collective of Mesopotamian goddesses, this collection is a conjuring of selves encountered through gender who arise to meet one another in all their Black queer joy and rage.
Communing with an ancestry of writers, healers, and found family, brown's collection maps the odyssey of a life lived in transition and serves as an archive of Black transmasc experience, of every burning crucible and every hard-won survival. “NO SPECTATORS ALLOWED” they/she/he asserts, insisting on our implication in this narrative, inviting us to traverse the intricate worlds crafted through its experimental poetic forms.
From the lunar shadows of this history of (un)becoming, poems bloom with epic blossoms, offering a potion that restores life. brown’s is an ecopoetics that looks to both the ocean’s depths and the expanses between stars for new methods of reclamation. As Steven Dunn writes in his introduction, if you “engage with this book with an open heart and throat” you will be changed by “all its beauty, ugly, rage, transformation, and necessary self-empowerment.” This book is a collection of healing spells. It is a hand reaching out to you in the dark.
they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming by dezireé a. brown is a momentous debut, tracking a self-proclaimed antihero’s quest for liberation via the transformative ritual of writing through the past, present, and future. Influenced by video game worlds, choose-your-own adventures, and a multifaceted collective of Mesopotamian goddesses, this collection is a conjuring of selves encountered through gender who arise to meet one another in all their Black queer joy and rage.
Communing with an ancestry of writers, healers, and found family, brown's collection maps the odyssey of a life lived in transition and serves as an archive of Black transmasc experience, of every burning crucible and every hard-won survival. “NO SPECTATORS ALLOWED” they/she/he asserts, insisting on our implication in this narrative, inviting us to traverse the intricate worlds crafted through its experimental poetic forms.
From the lunar shadows of this history of (un)becoming, poems bloom with epic blossoms, offering a potion that restores life. brown’s is an ecopoetics that looks to both the ocean’s depths and the expanses between stars for new methods of reclamation. As Steven Dunn writes in his introduction, if you “engage with this book with an open heart and throat” you will be changed by “all its beauty, ugly, rage, transformation, and necessary self-empowerment.” This book is a collection of healing spells. It is a hand reaching out to you in the dark.
124 pages, Paperback
Published November 4, 2025
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March 27, 2026
I'm crying in a café right now.
I wish I could have read this a decade ago.
Thank you for every single one of these poems. I have never loved and connected with a poetry collection as much as this one. I don't know how I feel about my own body at times, and everytime my eyes are opened to the ways in which transness takes form within others, I am filled with a sense of artistic awe and envy.
The collection is very often devastating and woeful, yet there is very clearly a desire for the simplicity in life, the kindness, and the security of a queer household that shines through. I LOVED the video game references.
I wish everyone a found family. I wish everyone a safe space. I wish everyone kind lives, joy, and love. I wish everyone understood how amazing it is to be queer. There is magic in discovering yourself, in putting your foot down for who you really are. Works like this prove it's a beautiful thing, prove that we are on the right track.
I wish I could have read this a decade ago.
Thank you for every single one of these poems. I have never loved and connected with a poetry collection as much as this one. I don't know how I feel about my own body at times, and everytime my eyes are opened to the ways in which transness takes form within others, I am filled with a sense of artistic awe and envy.
The collection is very often devastating and woeful, yet there is very clearly a desire for the simplicity in life, the kindness, and the security of a queer household that shines through. I LOVED the video game references.
I wish everyone a found family. I wish everyone a safe space. I wish everyone kind lives, joy, and love. I wish everyone understood how amazing it is to be queer. There is magic in discovering yourself, in putting your foot down for who you really are. Works like this prove it's a beautiful thing, prove that we are on the right track.
Displaying 1 of 1 review