The poems in Boyish reveal a reconciliation of southern and queer identities, following the poet from a Louisiana Baptist upbringing into transgender liberation. With a sense of rebellion and the revival of the hollered voice, this is an urgent narrative propelled by the necessity of upheaval, imagining what happens when we break through barriers of systemic violence and communal oppression to reconsider what could be. Boyish looks back at the status quo in order to move beyond, into a dream of a nonbinary utopia. A reckoning, this collection brings the reader along for revolution—a deep belief in possibility.

Each page builds tension that then shatters, bringing us into the interior of a story. Brody Parrish Craig invites us to carve out a space and to find ourselves carried over the gravel along the creek. Moving through the subconscious and embodied desire, these poems are rich with formal play, twisting language in dense sonnets. Landscapes of the city’s dystopia meet the queer pastoral, where conservation often means knowing what must be burned down.

A poetry collection that questions the current construction of psychiatric treatment while speaking through lived experience and advocating for disability justice.
 
The poems of Brody Parrish Craig’s new collection upends narratives around current psychiatric treatment models to focus on the lived experience of survivors and to speak toward liberation, abolition, and disability justice. Titled after the author’s own medical records, The Patient Is an Unreliable Historian questions the prevailing narrative that the medical industry knows stories of disability and madness better than those who have lived them.
 
Craig uses lyricism to expose the intersection of madness and criminality in contemporary American culture, moving through institutions, community spaces, and loss of kin. Through the course of the collection, the speaker turns toward irreverence and interrogation, carves out their own freedom, and challenges the script of the patient, the mad, and the “criminal.” These poems deconstruct the “patient” to set the person free.