A Boy in the City

by S. Yarberry

In this debut collection of poetry, the obscure and mundane collide, a fricassee of movement, the cosmopolitan, and intimacy.

A Boy in the City uses poems as pillars to interrupt and excavate an interiority that unfolds and interrogates grim thoughts and intimacy. Yarberry weaves a sexy, glitzy journey through their city, where the speaker can “pose” and “compose” in a “trans way, of course.” Clever in its playful allusions to Greek myths, William Blake, and other literary figures, A Boy in the City is a distinct work of joy and liberation that reckons with the language of gender and desire.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Transgender, Queer

92 pages, Paperback

First published August 2, 2022

Reviews

[Maddie]

Poignant mediations on unrequited longing and love, transness, masculinity, sex, and grieving the end of a relationship. I felt that grief right along with them.

I read this for today’s (well, technically yesterday’s) Sealey Challenge book. The Sealey Challenge is essentially to read one book of poetry every day in August. I’m very glad I happened to come across this title! Read via Kobo+.

4.5 stars rounded up to 5 for Goodreads.

[Melissa Pesu]

“It is nothing special
to not want to be hurt.”

[Robin]

This poetry made me feel more present and singularly focused on it, as if lost watching a thunderstorm. Somewhat repetitive, but often beautiful.

[Novi]

my favorite poetry collection ive read so far. ive been thinking about memorizing poems lately so i can always carry them with me whenever i want to return to them. there are definitely a couple poems in this collection that i want to keep with me. these poems reminded me of the beauty of the fear of becoming exactly what you want to be, the wholeness of breaking apart, and how i am constructing myself.
my favs:
The Scholar
A Cloak You Cannot Take Off
Down Below
The Cave
Dirt

[Cassie]

Sensual, romantic, heartbreaking, visceral--and somehow both classic and contemporary at the same time.

[Andrew]

Yarberry weaves personal and ambient elements with miscellaneous references to literature and art in a transmasculine collection with a focus on feelings of yearning, eros, and the occasional need to be nothing at all.

[Jendi]

It's been said that transgender temporality is different from the linear arc we expect of a life. We must become what, in one sense, we always already were. There is, yet is not, a line between Before and After. This simultaneity characterizes S. Yarberry's meditative, sensual debut collection of poetry. Time and the self are porous, "overpoured" in a way that can produce both self-disgust and ecstasy within moments of each other. Non-chronological memories of a female lover leave one wondering if the relationship has ended, or is about to begin, or whether these are even the same person in every story -- as, indeed, one wonders how to narrate memories of an identity we no longer inhabit. How to live in a body that makes us say both "I want/to be so unseen it hurts sometimes./If I could be dirt,/I would." and "You can marvel at me. I am marvelous."

The interiority of these poems makes this book feel very much of the moment, a quarantine-altered way of being "in the city" in which you are mostly alone in an apartment, hearing the noises and smelling the scents that remind you that the rest of humanity still exists, but not interacting with a community here and now. Reality gets fuzzy at the edges, breaking thoughts down into associative leaps (sometimes hard to follow), making room for erotic abjection and self-reshaping. "Say lover again./Tell me what to do./I can become anything. I did."

[Gabriel Noel]

ARC given by Edelweiss+ for Honest Review
4.5 stars rounded up

Prose and poetry that leans on the staccato style of narration. Very emotional and artistic in its nature. Yarberry writes about artworks in a beautiful way. The poems also reflect their life with gender identity.

My favorite poems are: "Lips Crash With Lips, Inevitable", "The Scholar", and "Cormorants."

[Kent]

I feel a little awkward starting with this reference to Eliot, “In the end is the beginning,” because I’m not sure I’d relate Yarberry’s consideration of world and self (especially a loving self) with the meditative centering of Eliot’s *Four Quartets*. And yet, it’s Yarberry’s choice to wait until the book’s ending before they’re explicit about their trans identity. It appears in the last handful of poems, and then the notes. And it’s not that I read poems looking for their clarification. It’s more that my reading is interested in complicating points of reference. Especially when so much of the book consists of familiar tropes around desire and love. How it can bewilder, how companionship can still feel isolating. What are you supposed to do when you want something, and it’s complicated to want anything, so it feels like contradiction to want the thing you really want. Desire for what you already know will be a fleeting satisfaction. Before you go back to wanting it again. Yarberry’s poems direct the reader to a “you,” recollecting “her” presence (it is often gendered as a woman), or being present with “her,” whether that presence is fantasy or reality.

I kept wondering how I should be reading these love poems. As devotionals to a self, especially a self that could look forward to a transition? Or poems to a literal lover? I was intrigued by the poet’s obscured gender. So that the desire and sexuality in the poems revel in the body, the sexual touch, the eager edge of sensuality, and the obscured gender queers the physicality of the sex scenes.

I think, though, many of the poems that operate as love poetry, expressing satisfaction or dissatisfaction with what the poet thinks of their lover or what their lover thinks of the poet, lose an opportunity to have more presence on the page. Like I read poems working in two different registers. In one, Yarberry lays out their desire, their concept of relationship, their struggle to navigate between the “she” and “he” of the poems. The poems that lay the relation out like a city or a landscape have a complexity that could occupy many different states of mind. The other register occurs in the poems with “you” as the center, and they feel a little too directed to what feels like a single sentiment to me. Something like, “I miss you, but I don’t know if I should miss you.” Reading through some of the notes, it seems to me there is more that could be present in those poems. Something that recognizes how this romance brought the poet to their own self encountering this more private self.

My sense of the end of Yarberry’s book proposing the beginning, then, is not so much about me holding to a reading that can’t allow information from the end to reflect back on the book. It’s about a book structure that I wish wasn’t compartmentalized, with poems speaking to thematic purposes.

[Sarah]

Picked this one up at a local indie bookstore—I’m not usually a huge poetry reader, but it had a nice blurb recommending it! I enjoyed how the collection had a strong transmaculine identity and had various classical allusions (Blake, Greek mythology, etc). There were a lot of lines/sounds/punctuation that I liked, but the poems were mostly on the vaguer side—I think I prefer a little more specificity and storytelling in poetry.

[AM]

Challenging and dark, with some luminous moments of peace.

[Al]

"i want to pick stoplights like apples, and call all green bulbs pears"(21)

[Jessica]

“I imagine, we listen to others / when we fail ourselves.” —Castles

[Sarkis Antonyan]

cheap writing

[Qonita]

INI BAGUS BGT HAHAH. I've read sensual poems before but this is the final boss of them all. It's barely explicit but i'm squealing like a teenager so many times. Like, it's HOT but there's a really soft composure and keen observations on the flavor of various secret hotnesses written so subtly and quietly it tickles like a hum in our ears. Master of form and sensitivity banget sih. Bintang 5 for lighting up some fireworks in my stomach.

[J]

I didn’t feel strongly about this collection. It wasn’t bad by any means, but I didn’t feel particularly moved by any of the poems. It did get a little repetitive, but there was a particular rhythm that carried throughout this collection that the repetition worked.

This is also somewhat of an erudite collection, in the sense that you can tell Yarberry is in academia. It’s the way they allude to Greek mythology and William Blake, primarily, while weaving in some theory (nothing heavy, for what it’s worth) to discuss their gender identity. Not a bad thing, by any means, but I can see how it might turn some people away.

That being said, I do plan on keeping an eye on their future works.

[Benjamin Niespodziany]

S. Yarberry’s debut poetry collection is a cohesive, ambient, and atmospheric journey through a metropolitan landscape. Feeling like a hazy voyage, this Deep Vellum release is reflective, cerebral, and image-driven. “we try to crawl inside each other’s bodies. / We sit like this until one of us disappears.” Start to finish, this one reads like music.

[ruby]

favs: automania, the cave, requiem circus, island of calypso