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Dead Boys in Space
The question is not why my brother had to die. The question is how do I save him?
Exploring the AIDS crisis, space colonization, and earth-bound lesbianism, DEAD BOYS IN SPACE uses poetry, speculative fiction, sci-fi, and crip queer politics to ask: what if a generation of gay men didn’t die of AIDS? What if their exile was actually escape? And what happened to the family they left behind?
Told from the perspective of a sister mourning her brother—one she never knew—Sara Youngblood Gregory’s startling debut, DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, is a testament to anger and love, sex and sickness, grief and family.
Exploring the AIDS crisis, space colonization, and earth-bound lesbianism, DEAD BOYS IN SPACE uses poetry, speculative fiction, sci-fi, and crip queer politics to ask: what if a generation of gay men didn’t die of AIDS? What if their exile was actually escape? And what happened to the family they left behind?
Told from the perspective of a sister mourning her brother—one she never knew—Sara Youngblood Gregory’s startling debut, DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, is a testament to anger and love, sex and sickness, grief and family.
- GenresPoetry
102 pages, Paperback
Published May 19, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 5, 2026
Absolutely the best book I’ve read this year. Maybe even the last two or three years.
Thought provoking in the best way and I enjoyed recognizing the Easter eggs of references to queer, historical literature!
I had no idea how much I would appreciate & enjoy this speculative retelling of the AIDS epidemic; I’m so glad I found my way to it.
Thank you to the author for my copy of this poignant & much needed collection!
Thought provoking in the best way and I enjoyed recognizing the Easter eggs of references to queer, historical literature!
I had no idea how much I would appreciate & enjoy this speculative retelling of the AIDS epidemic; I’m so glad I found my way to it.
Thank you to the author for my copy of this poignant & much needed collection!
May 28, 2026
WOW this is such a beautiful collection of poems that explored the AIDS crisis, lesbianism, queer politics, and just the experience of being a queer person using this fictional world. This book made me feel so many emotions, it made me feel like I was being stabbed in the chest, it made me feel seen, and it made me feel queer love and community. Such a beautiful book.
June 9, 2026
“the children of AIDS are connected by blood infection & sneaking out windows never to be seen again we are our parents' bastards of a disease that is still killing us and my god I miss the elders I have never known…”
Thank you so much to the author for the gifted copy! This book was published in the US by YesYes Books on May 19, 2026.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect going into Dead Boys in Space. Speculative poetry isn’t a form I’ve spent much time with, and I didn’t know how a collection could hold together something as expansive and devastating as the AIDS epidemic. I finished this book completely wrecked and deeply grateful that Sara Youngblood Gregory wrote it.
Dead Boys in Space is a speculative poetry collection that mourns queer lives lost to AIDS by imagining alternate futures. Told through the perspective of a sister grieving a brother she never truly knew, the collection moves between memory, archival absence, science fiction, family history, chronic illness, queerness, and rage. The opening line, “The only thing you need to know about him is that he’s not here,” establishes the emotional logic of the collection: absence is never empty. It leaves shapes behind.
Gregory’s language is lyrical but abrasive, intimate but archival. The poems move through compressed images and associative leaps, collapsing family grief into public history and bodily experience into political analysis. One missing brother becomes a generation of queer elders lost too early. The collection repeatedly returns to the question of what it means to inherit grief for people you never met and histories that were never fully handed down.
The beating heart of the collection is “One Million Dead Men: An Empirical Investigation Into New Sodom,” which imagines that the 1.1 million gay men who died during the AIDS epidemic were relocated to a lunar colony instead. It’s a breathtaking act of speculative grief that asks what happens when exile becomes survival, and what younger queer generations lose when intergenerational community is severed.
Again and again, Gregory refuses to treat HIV/AIDS as settled history. These poems insist that remembrance is active, political, and unfinished. They ask us to speak names, revisit what was erased, and imagine futures expansive enough to hold both anger and love.
If you’re looking for something queer to read this Pride Month, look no further.
📖 Read this if you love: Experimental and speculative poetry; AIDS history and queer cultural memory; books about chronic illness and crip queer politics; or the poems of Ocean Vuong and CAConrad.
🔑 Key Themes: Queer History and Cultural Inheritance, Chronic Illness and Embodiment, Homophobia Across Time, Anger as Love and Resistance, Speculative Futures and Alternative Histories, Remembering as Political Practice.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Epidemic (severe), Homophobia (severe), Death (severe), Grief (severe), Sexual Content (minor), War (minor), Suicide (minor).
Thank you so much to the author for the gifted copy! This book was published in the US by YesYes Books on May 19, 2026.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect going into Dead Boys in Space. Speculative poetry isn’t a form I’ve spent much time with, and I didn’t know how a collection could hold together something as expansive and devastating as the AIDS epidemic. I finished this book completely wrecked and deeply grateful that Sara Youngblood Gregory wrote it.
Dead Boys in Space is a speculative poetry collection that mourns queer lives lost to AIDS by imagining alternate futures. Told through the perspective of a sister grieving a brother she never truly knew, the collection moves between memory, archival absence, science fiction, family history, chronic illness, queerness, and rage. The opening line, “The only thing you need to know about him is that he’s not here,” establishes the emotional logic of the collection: absence is never empty. It leaves shapes behind.
Gregory’s language is lyrical but abrasive, intimate but archival. The poems move through compressed images and associative leaps, collapsing family grief into public history and bodily experience into political analysis. One missing brother becomes a generation of queer elders lost too early. The collection repeatedly returns to the question of what it means to inherit grief for people you never met and histories that were never fully handed down.
The beating heart of the collection is “One Million Dead Men: An Empirical Investigation Into New Sodom,” which imagines that the 1.1 million gay men who died during the AIDS epidemic were relocated to a lunar colony instead. It’s a breathtaking act of speculative grief that asks what happens when exile becomes survival, and what younger queer generations lose when intergenerational community is severed.
Again and again, Gregory refuses to treat HIV/AIDS as settled history. These poems insist that remembrance is active, political, and unfinished. They ask us to speak names, revisit what was erased, and imagine futures expansive enough to hold both anger and love.
If you’re looking for something queer to read this Pride Month, look no further.
📖 Read this if you love: Experimental and speculative poetry; AIDS history and queer cultural memory; books about chronic illness and crip queer politics; or the poems of Ocean Vuong and CAConrad.
🔑 Key Themes: Queer History and Cultural Inheritance, Chronic Illness and Embodiment, Homophobia Across Time, Anger as Love and Resistance, Speculative Futures and Alternative Histories, Remembering as Political Practice.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Epidemic (severe), Homophobia (severe), Death (severe), Grief (severe), Sexual Content (minor), War (minor), Suicide (minor).
Review of advance copy received from Author
A timeless collection, situated between the importance of memory and the oppression of futurity. High concept and expansive in its use of a variety of forms. The kind of collection where I had to do a lot of googling (encouraged in the text at times!) and re reading. Not because you'll feel stupid for not understanding all the references but because the collection is fundamentally an invitation to learn more. Some of my favourite individual poems (though all are elevated by the structure of the whole) :
Constellation
cardinal "there again is the anger of Patroclus"
GRID II
if you ask me why I read science fiction
Highly recommend.
Constellation
cardinal "there again is the anger of Patroclus"
GRID II
if you ask me why I read science fiction
Highly recommend.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
An eternal elegy that works in strange and weirded forms. Loved this.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews