WINTER OF WORSHIP

<p><span><b>Steeped in loss—of climate and childhood, of fathers and friends—<i>Winter of Worship</i> finds survival in our tender human connections.</b></span><span><span><br></span></span></p><p><span>Told through an ever-queer lens, Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s fourth collection, </span><span><i>Winter of Worship</i></span><span>, is a patchwork of the pastoral and the “litter swirled around us”—a pandemic, global warming, a hometown hit by storms of fentanyl </span><span>and </span><span>Oxycontin scripts. A book of elegy told in </span><span>ghazals, “Marble Runs,” and other forms, </span><span>these poems reckon with loss: </span><span>of climate, of fathers, of youth. </span><span>Candrilli writes, “We are so young / to know so much about life without / our friends.”</span><span> </span><span>Steeped in the grief of these losses, </span><span><i>Winter of Worship</i></span><span> finds healing in the smallest memories: Nokia phone cases, jalapeño gardens, pop flys, 67 Dodge darts, YouTube mixes “all electronica and / glitch step.” We also find survival in our tender human connections: an iPod tucked into the jacket pocket of a drifter, a kiss pressed to a partner’s forehead, a mother calling her child by their chosen name.</span><span> From the cornfields of Pennsylvania to the streets of downtown Brooklyn,</span><span> these poems refuse to forget, refuse to lose “an ounce of gentleness.”</span><br></p>