SOULMATE AS A VERB

Poems of tender knowledge, buoyant survival, and Black, trans embodiment.

The simple yet fraught experience of embodiment lies at the thrumming heart of Kelsey L. Smoot’s SOULMATE AS A VERB. Bodies make love possible, they enable tender connection and transmit electric joy, all while leaving one vulnerable to discord and abuse, heartbreak and grief. Like a body, Smoot’s daring poetry metabolizes cruelty, seeking the tender knowledge and kinships that allow for buoyant survival. The subjectivity of a Black, trans self becomes a prism, shining a variegated intellect on everything from suburbia to Palestine, top surgery to police violence. By utilizing forms such as kwansaba, calligram, Craigslist personals, and golden shovels, SOULMATE AS A VERB revels in structures that locate poet and poem in a lineage of innovative and contemporary Black, queer verse. Kelsey L. Smoot dazzles."Full of wisdom, wry humor, and tenderness, these poems so irresistibly explore the euphoric and the dysphoric, the performance of Black masculinity, and the body as a place and act, as both memory and future. This collection explodes the idea of transition as linear and redefines what we think we know about love.”
—Marisa Crane, author of A Sharp Endless Need

“Soulmate as a Verb maps a Black boi’s quest to fully inhabit a self, a body, transformed by love and by loss, by the ache of revolution and the ache of depression, by gender as it unfolds against our narrow grids. As such, this searching debut turns relentlessly toward what are, to me, the vital questions: How to ‘maintain a barrier’ enough to maintain one’s integrity, yet cultivate enough tenderness to turn toward each other, to change?”
—Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of An Optimism

“Soulmate as a Verb is a cold plunge into the mighty tides of Black masculinity’s past, present, and daring future; Kelz offers us the shocking opening of his own body as a life raft, an even mightier miracle. Through a lush exhibition of rhythm, Black family relic, and ‘fuck it’ bravado, he leads us to a freer place, an infinite number of worlds where—whether boi or not or monster or something else entirely—love will be there, and he will always share it.”
—Edwin Bodney, author of A Study of Hands

"An alchemist of Black vernacular and a believer in Black people."
—Jericho Brown, author of The New Testament

"Appealing to the universal desire of wanting a better world."
—KB Brookins, author of Pretty: A MemoirKelsey L. Smoot (they/he/Kelz) is a gender theorist, an elective Southerner, a writer, and a poet. Their autoethnographic style has become the lens through which they understand and reflect on their experience navigating the US sociopolitical landscape. They are the winner of the 2021 Sad Girls Club Spring Literary Contest, the 2023 The Good Life Review Honeybee Prize, and the Grand Prize Winner of the 2024 Button Poetry Video Contest. He is a Tin House Workshop alum, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best of the Net nominee, and a Best New Poets nominee. Proudly, Kelz is the author of two chapbooks: we was bois together and Muse.