Winter of Worship

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Steeped in loss—of climate and childhood, of fathers and friends— Winter of Worship finds survival in our tender human connections. 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. A book of elegy told in ghazals, "Marble Runs," and other forms, these poems reckon with loss: of climate, of fathers, of youth. Candrilli writes, "We are so young / to know so much about life without / our friends." Steeped in the grief of these losses, Winter of Worship 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