April 19, 2021
Candrilli (All the Gay Saints) delivers a candid and tender collection that explores a personal history fraught with addiction and a father’s violence while examining the aftermath of a double mastectomy. These reckonings question the burdens and beauty of the body: “I am trying to change the future/ my blood has written for me.” As the body and heart transform, the boundaries between the ecological, medical, and emotional collapse like overturned soil. “Though I am concerned for the earth’s rapid/ erosion,” Candrilli writes, “I have done it to myself. I have cleaved whole mountains from/ my chest and sent them to soak in an offshore landfill.” The collection has a noteworthy sestina and sonnet crown that showcases Candrilli’s powers as a poet. Amid the cruelties of country and misogyny, the aching, boundless love of speaker and partner forms a steadfast haven and offers a hopeful future: “All of my scars have become sails/ that can be used to sail anywhere.” Candrilli’s poems generously and poignantly invite readers to share in the promise “to try and live/ and live and live/ until the earth caves in.”
May 1, 2021
In their third collection, Candrilli (All the Gay Saints, 2020; What Runs Over, 2017) is a chimera, a creature that can graze the surface, signaling the danger beneath and diving deep, holding their breath and withstanding the pressure to capture what's essential, all the while dodging expected metaphors and language. Their tone is one of inevitable but gentle apocalypse, taking the well-worn "we are all dying" trope unusually close to the bone, examining impending climate disaster and the blessing and butchery of top surgery as part of gender transition. Yet throughout, there is hope and all different sizes of joy. "On Traveling Together" captures an unexpected connection in a motel lobby, and "Valentine, Nebraska: Cherry County" is a pure and pragmatic love poem. Candrilli is fearless with poetic convention. A majestic sestina expands both in image and line length, making space in a sometimes claustrophobic form. In "Transgender Heroic," a crown of 15 sonnets, the volta is queered by being split into odd numbered-stanzas of nine and five lines. Candrilli is both deliberate and dangerous, a thrilling combination.
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