K. Iver · poet

TheBook

Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco — Milkweed Editions, 2023.

Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco — book cover
The Book · Milkweed Editions · 2023

Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco

In small-town Mississippi, before the aughts, a child "assigned 'woman'" and a boy "forced to call himself a girl" love one another — from afar, behind closed doors, in motels. Years later the beloved, Missy, dies by suicide, kicking up a riptide of memory.

"Iver's fierce, sad debut collection offers a queer coming-of-age story and an elegy for the speaker's beloved, a trans man from Mississippi who killed himself at 27."— The New York Times
"K. Iver's Short Film is a gleaming counter-narrative of gender, place, and class."— Tyehimba Jess
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K. Iver leaning against a birch tree in late light Photograph — Jesse Dittmar
Praise for Short Film
"One of the most powerful excavations of grief in recent memory, a genderqueer kaddish."— Jonathan Miles, Garden & Gun

"Iver's poems will turn you inside out." — Garden & Gun

"Iver's fierce, sad debut collection offers a queer coming-of-age story and an elegy for the speaker's beloved." — The New York Times

"Iver's speaker lays out archives — proofs of living with and without their beloved. This collection breaks the binary between participation in the grief process and belief in the possibility of being." — C.T. Salazar, RHINO Poetry

"Iver's words are cinematic, their poems traceable stories by themselves that resonate and interact with each poem that follows." — Sam Edge, Southern Bookseller Review

"You need to read this book; you've been waiting for it your whole life." — Paige Lewis

"A gleaming counter-narrative of gender, place, and class." — Tyehimba Jess

"Brought me to my knees: in clumsy prayer, in imperfect grief, in an earnest and stumbling joy." — Kayleb Rae Candrilli

From the book

Poems from the book

"In the beginning, yes, a garden. As lush as you're imagining." — from Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco
"My acupuncturist says
you enjoy this, don't you.
She's talking about my grief. I say who else will." — from Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco