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Dispatch: Poems
Set against the media environment that saturates even our most intimate spaces, Dispatch attends to, revises, and thinks adjacent to the news of racial/gendered violence in the US, from the nineteenth century to the present day. These poems ask: What kind of revisions will make this a world/a story that is concerned with my people’s flourishing? How ought I pay attention, how to register perpetual bad news without letting it fatally intrude? Cameron Awkward-Rich is among the most bracing voices to emerge in recent years, a dazzling exemplar of poetry’s (and humanity’s) possibilities.
80 pages, Paperback
First published December 10, 2019
11 people are currently reading
1239 people want to read
About the author
Cameron Awkward-Rich
13 books118 followersCameron Awkward-Rich is a poet and a scholar of trans theory/expressive culture. Awkward-Rich received his B.A. in English and Biology from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. His writing and teaching creatively combine trans/feminist/queer theory, disability studies, black studies, and poetry and other forms of experimental writing to explore transgender aesthetics and cultural production, the conflicted histories of trans/feminist/queer thought in the U.S., and collective affect/feeling.
Presently, he is an associate professor in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Presently, he is an associate professor in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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May 30, 2025
‘I used to fear my body,’ Cameron Awkward-Rich writes, ‘was a well anyone could toss / their wishes into.’ It starts Dispatch, the poet’s second collection, with a bang, quite literally in fact as the poem features the speaker being hit by a car returning their thoughts from the clouds of joy for it being their birthday and returning to the present of the body. It presents itself as a recurring motif across Dispatch, confronting the fragility of marginalized livelihood just trying to survive ‘In a world that is so determined to kill us,’ while also holding in tension the desire to be seen with the desire to be invisible as safekeeping against a world that refuses to see you anyway. With poetically blunt and aspirational prose veering through the struggles of systemic, intersectional violence against trans and Black people while caterwauling against the social static that drowns out such voices, we find Awkward-Rich ensuring these voices have space while trying to decode if we are ‘proximate to love.’ In this way Dispatches is a harrowing and heart wrenching read, yet one that reminds us that it is through vulnerability we also open ourselves to joy and possibility.
Meditations in an Emergency
I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds &
the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I
ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in
Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents
beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old
women hawking roses, & children all of them,
break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I
love the world. I run from end to end like fingers
through her hair. There are no borders, only wind.
Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the
institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand
on my stupid heart.
Awkward-Rich has a true talent to carry the reader through a poem in a way that leaves the reader feeling we have stepped through hand-in-hand with the speaker, a unity of empathy forged with each gorgeous line of prose they deliver. The poems here directly address issues of trans and Black identity and Awkward-Rich writes imagery that forms so vividly in your mind its as if his words were an incantation for queer protection. Everything is held in tension here, especially ideas of language and the body. On one hand, we celebrate the notion that we have an ability ‘to make the world / with language,’—something occurring with each page as Awkward-Rich molds your heart and mind with poetry—yet he also invokes the ways language can be violence. We declare war, for instance, we ignore a genocide by covering it up in language that distracts from the horrors. ‘As a child / in America / you disregard / the wound of language’ he writes in Etymology, and we must consider our use of language in relation to our resistance against violence. As Rebecca Solnit writes in Call Them By Their True Names, ‘the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.’ Language is a gift, but also a responsibility with deeply moral implications.
The trouble with elegy
Is that it asks the dead
To live, it calls them back.
& who am I to say rise?
Violence lurks in every corner of this collection, even in the multiple poems titled Love Poem which highlight a moment of affection yet make us aware of the violence threatening the moment’s perimeters.The first of the series addresses aspects of pronouns and directly confronts issues of violence in language, but there is also incredible commentary on interpersonal passions and how desire occurs in relation to the violence all around us. ‘I suppose I’m grateful / when I can leave myself for long enough /to let a stranger or a love inside me,’ Awkward-Rich writes in one such poem, ‘to be held / open as a tunnel for all the midnight traffic / or only you.’ The notion of the body as a space, as a room, as a political object, as an absence, as a relief or even a threat permeates the collection. Dear dear boi / Who’s body I slip into, / wear as a jacket against the rain,’ he writes, showing a moment where even tenderness arrives in a way that forces us to consider how capitalist use value blurs our (mis)understandings of one another.
The truth is, most black folk look at you & see
a woman. White people look at you & see a
reckless boy. Either way, there you are in the
room with your body.
Rooms are a frequent motif in here, both directly or tangentially related to the body itself. We are both the room and an occupier of the room. ‘Here’s a room / where every bullet planted blooms,’ or how we occupy our body like a room labeled with our various identities. A room to store our thoughts about our bodies, our thoughts about our desires, or our families (‘a father grows strange // to his family & a daughter / grows up to become him’). Physical room, such as space on a page, is compounded into the complex metaphor as well and Awkward-Rich plays with form for this effect, such as how there are multiple poems titled [Black Feeling] which, collectively, takes up a major piece of real estate in the collection as a further commentary on its plea for Black and queer bodies to have space in our world.
Yes.
This is the world
with me in it. It is
beautiful. It is.
Despite a cavalcade of heavy subject matter and emotionally charged proses, Dispatches still leaves the reader with a feeling of hope. The final poem, which I’ll share in a moment, certainly sends us off on a positive note, but that is the whole intent to begin with. Look at the title. We, the reader, have been dispatched by the poet to spread his message, to spread the space even if just in the minds of a few people each thinking about the meanings of the poetry and engaging with the plea for space and kindness and love for marginalized people. Dispatches is a brief collection, but it has no shortage of beauty.
4.5/5
Cento Between the Ending and the End
Sometimes you don’t die
when you’re supposed to
& now I have a choice
repair a world or build
a new one inside my body
a white door opens
into a place queerly brimming
gold light so velvet-gold
it is like the world
hasn’t happened
when I call out
all my friends are there
everyone we love
is still alive gathered
at the lakeside
like constellations
my honeyed kin
honeyed light
beneath the sky
a garden blue stalks
white buds the moon’s
marble glow the fire
distant & flickering
the body whole bright-
winged brimming
with the hours
of the day beautiful
nameless planet. Oh
friends, my friends—
bloom how you must, wild
until we are free.
Meditations in an Emergency
I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds &
the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I
ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in
Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents
beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old
women hawking roses, & children all of them,
break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I
love the world. I run from end to end like fingers
through her hair. There are no borders, only wind.
Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the
institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand
on my stupid heart.
Awkward-Rich has a true talent to carry the reader through a poem in a way that leaves the reader feeling we have stepped through hand-in-hand with the speaker, a unity of empathy forged with each gorgeous line of prose they deliver. The poems here directly address issues of trans and Black identity and Awkward-Rich writes imagery that forms so vividly in your mind its as if his words were an incantation for queer protection. Everything is held in tension here, especially ideas of language and the body. On one hand, we celebrate the notion that we have an ability ‘to make the world / with language,’—something occurring with each page as Awkward-Rich molds your heart and mind with poetry—yet he also invokes the ways language can be violence. We declare war, for instance, we ignore a genocide by covering it up in language that distracts from the horrors. ‘As a child / in America / you disregard / the wound of language’ he writes in Etymology, and we must consider our use of language in relation to our resistance against violence. As Rebecca Solnit writes in Call Them By Their True Names, ‘the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.’ Language is a gift, but also a responsibility with deeply moral implications.
The trouble with elegy
Is that it asks the dead
To live, it calls them back.
& who am I to say rise?
Violence lurks in every corner of this collection, even in the multiple poems titled Love Poem which highlight a moment of affection yet make us aware of the violence threatening the moment’s perimeters.The first of the series addresses aspects of pronouns and directly confronts issues of violence in language, but there is also incredible commentary on interpersonal passions and how desire occurs in relation to the violence all around us. ‘I suppose I’m grateful / when I can leave myself for long enough /to let a stranger or a love inside me,’ Awkward-Rich writes in one such poem, ‘to be held / open as a tunnel for all the midnight traffic / or only you.’ The notion of the body as a space, as a room, as a political object, as an absence, as a relief or even a threat permeates the collection. Dear dear boi / Who’s body I slip into, / wear as a jacket against the rain,’ he writes, showing a moment where even tenderness arrives in a way that forces us to consider how capitalist use value blurs our (mis)understandings of one another.
The truth is, most black folk look at you & see
a woman. White people look at you & see a
reckless boy. Either way, there you are in the
room with your body.
Rooms are a frequent motif in here, both directly or tangentially related to the body itself. We are both the room and an occupier of the room. ‘Here’s a room / where every bullet planted blooms,’ or how we occupy our body like a room labeled with our various identities. A room to store our thoughts about our bodies, our thoughts about our desires, or our families (‘a father grows strange // to his family & a daughter / grows up to become him’). Physical room, such as space on a page, is compounded into the complex metaphor as well and Awkward-Rich plays with form for this effect, such as how there are multiple poems titled [Black Feeling] which, collectively, takes up a major piece of real estate in the collection as a further commentary on its plea for Black and queer bodies to have space in our world.
Yes.
This is the world
with me in it. It is
beautiful. It is.
Despite a cavalcade of heavy subject matter and emotionally charged proses, Dispatches still leaves the reader with a feeling of hope. The final poem, which I’ll share in a moment, certainly sends us off on a positive note, but that is the whole intent to begin with. Look at the title. We, the reader, have been dispatched by the poet to spread his message, to spread the space even if just in the minds of a few people each thinking about the meanings of the poetry and engaging with the plea for space and kindness and love for marginalized people. Dispatches is a brief collection, but it has no shortage of beauty.
4.5/5
Cento Between the Ending and the End
Sometimes you don’t die
when you’re supposed to
& now I have a choice
repair a world or build
a new one inside my body
a white door opens
into a place queerly brimming
gold light so velvet-gold
it is like the world
hasn’t happened
when I call out
all my friends are there
everyone we love
is still alive gathered
at the lakeside
like constellations
my honeyed kin
honeyed light
beneath the sky
a garden blue stalks
white buds the moon’s
marble glow the fire
distant & flickering
the body whole bright-
winged brimming
with the hours
of the day beautiful
nameless planet. Oh
friends, my friends—
bloom how you must, wild
until we are free.
April 21, 2020
A new to me voice I'm glad I read. Just read Cento Between Beginning and End which is "composed of language scavenged from the works of Justin Phillip Reed, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Fatimah Asghar, Kaveh Akbar, sam sax, Ari Banias, C. Bain, Oliver Bendorf, Hanif Abdurraqib, Safia Elhillo, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Franny Choi, Lucille Clifton, and Nate Marshall. All of whom have made for me a world and for whom I wish the world” and you will know why I feel so strongly about this poet and these poems (how many of my favorites are in that list, it's truly incredible....)
January 8, 2020
"Yes./ This is the world/ with me in it. It is/ beautiful. It is." A poetry collection as beautiful as the world it describes, "Dispatch" digs deeply into our identities and the way they are affected by circumstances and encounters. Stunning and important poetry.
October 29, 2024
hand on my heart. hand on my stupid heart
Read
March 27, 2023Really beautiful.
August 9, 2021
A really beautiful collection, even as it grapples with difficult things. Awkward-Rich's reflections on the sensations of being surrounded by death, have it pressing in, and have to tread water on how to continue with all of that. Favorite poems include "Meditations in an Emergency" and "Love Poem."
July 11, 2024
'Meditations in an Emergency' will always be one of my favorite poems. It is a perfect poem. But here are some other lines I liked that I want to remember:
"[As Child, I too
was an impersonator
I had a body
&, also, a life
that moved
with no regard
for form
God willing, my will
carry me]"
"[As Child, I too
was an impersonator
I had a body
&, also, a life
that moved
with no regard
for form
God willing, my will
carry me]"
July 23, 2023
This book is excellently written and deeply moving. Very evocative of Danez Smith’s poetry about queer, Black bodies and the challenges and discriminations they face, particularly in America. However, this book is also unique and tackles transgender poetry in a way I’ve never experienced before. Somehow both figurative and visceral, this collection plunges the reader into thought while also absorbing you in stunning syntax. Cameron Awkward-Rich so deeply explores bodies and the social spaces they take up(are “allowed” to take up) in this collection that I can feel each word affect my own body, and my soul as well. Very well done collection and a rather quick read as well, though that does not make it any less impactful. I did, however, find myself reaching the end of the book wanting more.
August 15, 2020
150820: quarantine buddy read #15 with Keagan!
January 26, 2025
whenever i remember "meditations in an emergency" i feel like crying. sometimes i recite it to myself, read it, then read it again. never gets easier
January 5, 2024
I think having the framing question in the goodreads synopsis makes this collection stronger: “what kinds of revisions will make this a world/a story that is concerned with my people’s flourishing?”
There are some powerful poems here. The faves being the last [black feeling] and especially “cento between the ending and the end”—a poem about friendship which is made better knowing it is constructed from poems by the poet’s many poet friends.
There are some powerful poems here. The faves being the last [black feeling] and especially “cento between the ending and the end”—a poem about friendship which is made better knowing it is constructed from poems by the poet’s many poet friends.
April 21, 2022
I hardly know how to review poetry. Cameron Awkward-Rich has poems that are wrenching, relatable, understandable, and glowing. A complicated relationship with love and sex. Explores the body, the racialized body, the disabled body. In communication with other poets and poems (noted at the back, to read in context).
We went to a stand up show and a comedian asked us our favorite poet, and Awkward-Rich was top of mind. I'm glad to finally read one of his books.
We went to a stand up show and a comedian asked us our favorite poet, and Awkward-Rich was top of mind. I'm glad to finally read one of his books.
February 19, 2025
I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.
December 29, 2020
These poems of a Black Trans guy navigating the paths of family, a brutal world, and reflections of his own body, astonished me. There is a deeply ruminative precision and playful snap to the language simultaneously, as lines examine the existences people create and reform for themselves, contemporarily and historically, that America punishes again and again, sometimes by social impingement or authoritarian state violence. In the end though, Akward-Rich brings a rueful tribute and love of self, friends, family, and ancestors that pops and impacts their lives as an emphatic reality.
July 10, 2020
I thought this book was excellent and thoroughly inspiring. I’m looking forward to diving back into it.
August 25, 2020
Moving collection of poems by transgender poet Awkward-Rich. The collection has poems which address being a young black child, gender, relationships and emotional connections, loneliness, and racial/gendered violence in the US, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Three and a half stars!
October 20, 2025
YES SO GOOD. on a roll with the past couple things i have been reading
March 28, 2022
yknow how i said i usually dont connect with poetry
Read
December 30, 2020I struggle to understand the system by which one can “rate” a collection of poems, but like always, I want to record my experience with this book, so I can remember said experience two years down the road. :) Dispatch was gifted to me by the Julep Town Collective, a wonderful community of readers that I am hoping to join in discussion in 2021. While I am months behind their group read of this collection, I’d like to “review” it by belatedly answering JTC’s discussion questions:
Question 1: Share your favorite poem from this book. Why did this particular poem stand out to you?
My favorite poem in this book was “The Cure for What Ails You”, on page 54. I loved the generational reversals in this poem, as the narrator becomes a skeptic, student, and ultimately a peddler of the “golden bullet remedies” so many of our mothers share. On a broader level, this poem encapsulates everything I loved most in Dispatch: Cameron Awkward-Rich’s humor, vision (and revision), physicality, and fearlessness when asking troubling questions about the world we live in.
Some of his greatest questions are raised in “The Cure for What Ails You”, and many echo throughout the book: What does it mean to live in a world that is ending, and failing so many who are trying to hold onto it? What does it mean to live in a body that is weaponized by society, and constructed to become one of “only two” genders? How do these societal constructs of gender become cages? How could the end of this world dismantle those (amongst other) cages?
Question 2: What do you think the author’s purpose was in writing this book? What do you think he was trying to get across?
I’m not sure if this was his only purpose, but personally, I think Awkward-Rich’s work led me to ask the questions above. I think of these as guided questions that carry readers to the book’s final invitation: to think about the end of our world. (As many people are learning, this is another definition of abolition.) This book’s embrace of death, troubling of elegy, and refusal to ask dying people to “walk again among those/who could not bear/the sight of you” is part of the invitation (which I see as the main purpose.)
Other thoughts on purpose: In my understanding, Awkward-Rich writes these poems not to be depressing, but to encourage readers to imagine something better after “death.” Through these poems, he’s letting us know that we have the choice to “repair a world or build/a new one.” I think he’s asking to imagine this new world, which would come through the death of our existing systems, and then build this new world in whatever intimate and public ways we can. This world is one where marginalized genders could thrive: “the world is ending...& I can’t bear knowing there’s a door/& behind the door a country/that loves my sisters, that tends/their gorgeous lives.”
Question 3: Would you recommend this book to someone else?
While I would recommend certain poems to anyone, I would recommend the entire book to poets and/or those reading with a group. These poems stand on their own two feet, but they are also sequential in a manner that few poetry collections can pull off. I think poets would enjoy the craft of this, and I think a community of readers would enjoy unpacking the sequences together.
Question 4: Do you have any other thoughts that you would like to share?
Just like these poems return to each other, I will look forward to returning to this book in the future.
Question 1: Share your favorite poem from this book. Why did this particular poem stand out to you?
My favorite poem in this book was “The Cure for What Ails You”, on page 54. I loved the generational reversals in this poem, as the narrator becomes a skeptic, student, and ultimately a peddler of the “golden bullet remedies” so many of our mothers share. On a broader level, this poem encapsulates everything I loved most in Dispatch: Cameron Awkward-Rich’s humor, vision (and revision), physicality, and fearlessness when asking troubling questions about the world we live in.
Some of his greatest questions are raised in “The Cure for What Ails You”, and many echo throughout the book: What does it mean to live in a world that is ending, and failing so many who are trying to hold onto it? What does it mean to live in a body that is weaponized by society, and constructed to become one of “only two” genders? How do these societal constructs of gender become cages? How could the end of this world dismantle those (amongst other) cages?
Question 2: What do you think the author’s purpose was in writing this book? What do you think he was trying to get across?
I’m not sure if this was his only purpose, but personally, I think Awkward-Rich’s work led me to ask the questions above. I think of these as guided questions that carry readers to the book’s final invitation: to think about the end of our world. (As many people are learning, this is another definition of abolition.) This book’s embrace of death, troubling of elegy, and refusal to ask dying people to “walk again among those/who could not bear/the sight of you” is part of the invitation (which I see as the main purpose.)
Other thoughts on purpose: In my understanding, Awkward-Rich writes these poems not to be depressing, but to encourage readers to imagine something better after “death.” Through these poems, he’s letting us know that we have the choice to “repair a world or build/a new one.” I think he’s asking to imagine this new world, which would come through the death of our existing systems, and then build this new world in whatever intimate and public ways we can. This world is one where marginalized genders could thrive: “the world is ending...& I can’t bear knowing there’s a door/& behind the door a country/that loves my sisters, that tends/their gorgeous lives.”
Question 3: Would you recommend this book to someone else?
While I would recommend certain poems to anyone, I would recommend the entire book to poets and/or those reading with a group. These poems stand on their own two feet, but they are also sequential in a manner that few poetry collections can pull off. I think poets would enjoy the craft of this, and I think a community of readers would enjoy unpacking the sequences together.
Question 4: Do you have any other thoughts that you would like to share?
Just like these poems return to each other, I will look forward to returning to this book in the future.
November 27, 2020
I really wanted to love this, the whole way through I tried to do so. I could tell how personal the content was and how important the telling of that story is. But the writing didn’t connect with me. Something about the structures and syntax felt disjointed and broke the poems up in ways that stopped lines from really hitting home. It felt each poem was decided upon before it was written, and so the writing hadn’t flowed but instead had been shaped around an intent. It felt like it was trying too hard to be too many things. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it or wouldn’t recommend, I think that there was some really beauty in places, and a voice that deserves to be heard. I just didn’t feel it in my chest the way I feel poets like Ocean Vuong or Natalie Diaz or Franny Choi.
March 10, 2024
a balm !!
not only does this collection powerfully grapple with racial and gendered violence in the U.S. (amplified especially in the present with social media), but it also beautifully reflects how we move forward despite the horrors enacted upon our bodies, others, and the world (solace in love, friends, family, etc.)
not only does this collection powerfully grapple with racial and gendered violence in the U.S. (amplified especially in the present with social media), but it also beautifully reflects how we move forward despite the horrors enacted upon our bodies, others, and the world (solace in love, friends, family, etc.)
December 26, 2019
beautiful beautiful beautiful
February 24, 2022
I read this in a single sitting, unable to put it down.
This is a grief-stricken collection. The tinnitus brought on by police violence against Black men echoes Terrance Hayes’s words that “there never was a Black male hysteria.” The lives of Black women are even more precarious, as spelled out in Anti-Elegy: “Once, a girl looked in the mirror / & called herself, said my name is / said I am. / I am & a man said / mine/mine/mine”.
It is also a hopeful collection, drawing our attention to moments of beauty and optimism that spring up in the face of horrifying circumstances, such as the June 2015 Charleston AME shooting: “This is the world / with me in it. It is / beautiful. It is” (Bad News Again”).
“Think love & you don’t even have to die,” (All my Friends are Sad & Bright”).
This book feels to brief, and by that I don’t mean that I feel like anything has been left out. Instead, what I mean is that I think the world would be better off for reading more of Awkward-Rich’s observations. The book feels slight, but what I mean is that I keep wanting to write about Akward-Rich’s short lines, but that’s not really the case at all—the reality is that there are long-lined pieces as well as short-lined and prose. I’m still trying to figure out why I think they’re all shorter. When I figure it out I will let you know. In the meantime, go pick this up yourself.
This is a grief-stricken collection. The tinnitus brought on by police violence against Black men echoes Terrance Hayes’s words that “there never was a Black male hysteria.” The lives of Black women are even more precarious, as spelled out in Anti-Elegy: “Once, a girl looked in the mirror / & called herself, said my name is / said I am. / I am & a man said / mine/mine/mine”.
It is also a hopeful collection, drawing our attention to moments of beauty and optimism that spring up in the face of horrifying circumstances, such as the June 2015 Charleston AME shooting: “This is the world / with me in it. It is / beautiful. It is” (Bad News Again”).
“Think love & you don’t even have to die,” (All my Friends are Sad & Bright”).
This book feels to brief, and by that I don’t mean that I feel like anything has been left out. Instead, what I mean is that I think the world would be better off for reading more of Awkward-Rich’s observations. The book feels slight, but what I mean is that I keep wanting to write about Akward-Rich’s short lines, but that’s not really the case at all—the reality is that there are long-lined pieces as well as short-lined and prose. I’m still trying to figure out why I think they’re all shorter. When I figure it out I will let you know. In the meantime, go pick this up yourself.
July 24, 2022
They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but also words can never hurt me. Language is wielded as a weapon by the socio-economic base in power. It is time that the oppressed shall use language as well. And not in “senseless litany” and chants rather in poems like “Anti-Elegy.” In this particular poem, Awkward-Rich uses language to fight back at particularly how language has been used by the patriarchy to control/own women. How women’s names are hollow holes, used to be filled with male desires.
Awkward-Rich exemplifies how poetry can draw the emotion out of logic. How much you can learn in so little, beautiful or melancholy words. There is spanning theme of “Rooms” and its connection to ourselves, with new objects placed in, ones uncharted, and ones to be filled. He connects with his readers in logos, pathos, and ethos and even shared experience in poems like “Aubade” and “The Cure for What Ails You.” Definitely recommend this for all of my genderqueer, trans, fans of Ocean Vuong, Fatima’s Asghar, or Frank O’Hara.
Awkward-Rich exemplifies how poetry can draw the emotion out of logic. How much you can learn in so little, beautiful or melancholy words. There is spanning theme of “Rooms” and its connection to ourselves, with new objects placed in, ones uncharted, and ones to be filled. He connects with his readers in logos, pathos, and ethos and even shared experience in poems like “Aubade” and “The Cure for What Ails You.” Definitely recommend this for all of my genderqueer, trans, fans of Ocean Vuong, Fatima’s Asghar, or Frank O’Hara.
June 4, 2020
Stunned, awed, knocked over backwards by this incredible book. I did not mean to start reading this book right before my neighborhood burned & my city became the center of international protests calling for justice for George Floyd, who was murdered by the cops. But I can’t imagine a better time to have opened this. I am grateful for these words at a time when I feel constantly at a loss for them. Cameron Awkward-Rich has written his way into the pain of this moment, which for the Black community isn’t a moment but an everyday reality, & it’s important that we hear it.
from [Black Feeling]:
What strange
benevolence:
this morning, again
the country ablaze
firework / gunfire / man
of music & I
alone in the manic dark, head
in my hands ringing
& ringing, faithful
goddamned blood alarm.
from [Black Feeling]:
What strange
benevolence:
this morning, again
the country ablaze
firework / gunfire / man
of music & I
alone in the manic dark, head
in my hands ringing
& ringing, faithful
goddamned blood alarm.
October 11, 2023
A collection of poems about identity, survival, society, love and hope.
from Bad Weather: "I used to fear my body / was a well anyone could toss // their wishes into, unbothered surface / pocked with light, so I'd be lying // if I said I didn't love it, the new storm, / minor catastrophe, me // in its mute eye."
from Walking Lake Calhoun: "Here is the circle of my life / & here is yours, tangent extending / indefinitely away & here is the place / where, by definition, they always meet."
from Etymology: "as a child / in America / you disregard / the wound of language / (how does it go? / sticks and stones?)"
from Bad Weather: "I used to fear my body / was a well anyone could toss // their wishes into, unbothered surface / pocked with light, so I'd be lying // if I said I didn't love it, the new storm, / minor catastrophe, me // in its mute eye."
from Walking Lake Calhoun: "Here is the circle of my life / & here is yours, tangent extending / indefinitely away & here is the place / where, by definition, they always meet."
from Etymology: "as a child / in America / you disregard / the wound of language / (how does it go? / sticks and stones?)"
May 1, 2025
Dispatch is a stunning, gut-punch of a poetry collection that blends vulnerability, rage, tenderness, and survival in a way that feels both intimate and deeply political. Cameron Awkward-Rich writes from the intersections of Blackness, queerness, and trans identity with honesty that doesn’t flinch; and somehow still manages to hold space for hope. These poems aren’t just reflections; they’re dispatches from lived experience, moments of stillness and motion, grief and love. I was especially struck by how he writes about the body; how it’s seen, misread, protected, or broken. And how memory and trauma shape relationships. It’s raw, reflective, and beautifully written.
May 8, 2020
I had not heard of Cameron Awkward-Rich until very recently. Someone who saw that I had recently read Sam Sax and Hanif Abdurraqib suggested that I read him so I gave this one a shot. I am so glad that I did.
I would not put this book quite as high as those other two poets but by a hair only. This is gorgeous, fiery work. Meaningful and impactful.
My favorite poem is Walking to Lake Calhoun.
This is absolutely fantastic stuff - another writer to look into, for sure.
I would not put this book quite as high as those other two poets but by a hair only. This is gorgeous, fiery work. Meaningful and impactful.
My favorite poem is Walking to Lake Calhoun.
This is absolutely fantastic stuff - another writer to look into, for sure.
December 11, 2020
Dispatch is a wonderful collection of raw, reorganizing, eloquent poems. The ways in which Cameron Awkward-Rich bends and slices and rebuilds with a resiliency of structure and language to create a trans poetic project is clever and moving. In moments it felt a little roving, lost in the garden of Awkward-Rich’s attempts, but maybe the keeping-out was a part of it too; a protective fence. I’m not sure, but overall I found it tender, tough, and utterly lovely.
August 7, 2023
This is the first full collection I’ve read by Cameron Awkward-Rich, and nearly every time I read a collection after only having engaged with poems of theirs found out in the world, there are dead spaces between what seemed spectacular and the full range of what is. That is not the case with Awkward-Rich. It doesn’t matter the subject or the form: whether it’s couplets, a series poem, or erasure (the erasure!!!); his poems sing on every page. I never want to leave.
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