ISBN: 978-1-949099-20-1
23 pages
In BOYSTUFF, Kenner reminds us that desire is a living thing, chock full of its own needs and specifications, fickle when given the wrong amount of sunlight or water. The images are composed with a horny, sorrowful wit, desperate to woo us into a race for satisfaction. When desire dies, what replaces it? Obsession? Defeat? Poetry? And does writing or fucking make you cum faster? Kenner's iterative sonnets demand that we continue yearning, long after it's become embarrassing, if only for the sake of our future purity.
— Nazareth Hassan, author of Untitled (1-5) and Slow Mania
BOYSTUFF is a dirty sonnet crown and a devotional candle. Philip Kenner writes with relentless vulnerability and formal agility, disarming us with his syntax before gutting us with his sincerity. The poems flirt, sob, confess, recoil, and spiral into the kind of psycho-spiritual chaos that feels blessedly familiar to anyone who's ever tried to stop loving the wrong boy (or write a poem about it). This is the horny sublime: dirt-wrecked, linguistically glowy, and vibrating with mortal tenderness. I want to laminate every page.
— Karyna McGlynn, author of 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse
Philip Kenner's BOYSTUFF is the gender expansive gay sleepover your parents warned you about. These fresh, daring poems wrestle with hard-earned revelations to offer soul-deep permissions. Kenner is a devoted observer, exploring the mundanity of grief and desire with as equal care as the spectacle. These poems are as wholehearted as they are cheeky as they are devastating — willing to "rage against easy" they "come out clean." The sonnet crown that spans the collection spins and doubles back like a party trick, an old fable, the kind of story you will carry with you into the rest of your life. Spun out of Kenner's well knit syntax and their uncanny ability to make and unmake a world, BOYSTUFF will have you coming undone and more together than before.
— Acie Clark
Sample poem from BOYSTUFF:
And fear will fail. To turn you from the door,
I have to make a room worth turning towards,
or maybe that’s the story that I need
to write another sonnet. When I’m done
with stroking out the morning, there I reach
for words to stick you with, a plastic form
to hold the gluey paper in a shape.
I’m still a boy and so are you, and stuff
falls out our mouths in rapid streams of lines
from movies, shows, and clips that raised us when
the internet took on its tender role
as parent number three. It slipped us drugs
and said that’s it’s okay as long as we
“just do it in the house where I can see.”
