Kayleb Rae Candrilli Selected Works

Water I Won't Touch
Poems

Both radically tender and desperate for change, Water I Won't Touch is a life raft and a self-portrait, concerned with the vitality of trans people living in a dangerous and inhospitable landscape. Through the brambles of the Pennsylvania forest to a stretch of the Jersey Shore, in quiet moments and violent memories, Kayleb Rae Candrilli touches the broken earth and examines the whole in its parts. 

Test Square Cover
Subtitle

A small town in the American South takes a strange, silent visitor in and nicknames them Pew. As the town prepares for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, townspeople confess their secrets to Pew. By the time Pew’s story reaches a climax, the secret of their true nature is dwarfed by larger truths.

What Runs Over

Born from the isolation of rural Pennsylvania, a life of homeschooling, and physiological and physical domestic abuse, Kayleb Rae Candrilli's memoir in verse, What Runs Over, demands attention. Unfurling and unrelenting in its delivery, Candrilli has painted "the mountain" in excruciating detail. They show readers a world of canned peaches, of Borax-cured bear hides, of urine-filled Gatorade bottles, of the syringe and all the syringe may carry. They show a world of violence and its many personas. What Runs Over, too, is a story of rural queerness, of a transgender boy almost lost to the forest forever.

Winter of Worship

Told through an ever-queer lens, Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s fourth collection, Winter of Worship, is a patchwork of the pastoral and the “litter swirled around us”—a pandemic, global warming, a hometown hit by storms of fentanyl and Oxycontin scripts.