Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s third book of poetry, Water I Won’t Touch, is a collection of poems about the trans experience. Candrilli captures their transformation in free verse that feels like it’s been pulled from a diary. While reading Candrilli’s Water I Won’t Touch (Candrilli’s third book of poetry) I found myself often reminded of Rupi Kaur’s Home Body (Kaur’s third book of poetry). While Candrilli’s poetry explores the trans experience and Kaur’s poetry explores cis female experience, both poets share a simplicity of expression, a bare, almost barren, directness of language in the search for embodied self-acceptance, and a reliance on the relatively unadorned conveyance of their personal stories in free verse. While it isn’t the best book poetry I’ve read all year, Candrilli’s poetry offers a space for solace, and can provide trans youth growing and going through similar experiences a place for commiseration. This makes the book important. In the same way that I cautiously applaud Kaur’s somewhat clumsy poetry for its ability to sometimes transcend its own limitations, I applaud Candrilli’s Water I Won’t Touch, for offering a similar testament to the transcendence of trauma and the power of coming into one’s own while inhabiting one’s own body fully. Both writers explore what it means to reside in a body in a world hostile to that body. Candrilli’s Water I Won’t Touch offers a space where trans youth can find deep solace.
While Candrilli’s poetry is more sophisticated than Kaur’s, this is the result of education and good editing. Kaur’s poetry is rougher around the edges, less self-consciously formed, but for all of Candrilli’s careful MFA-styled shaping, the poems “feel” much like Kaur’s, unfiltered experience recollected in tranquility. Here are two lines: “In the beginning, there was a boy, / who touched me as he shouldn’t have.” Who wrote this? Kaur or Candrilli?
Those are the first two lines of the first poem in Water I Won’t Touch. The poem goes on: “I think I knew I was a boy / when the boy touched me.”
Sometimes, less is more. Candrilli writes: “Sometimes it is so easy to have so little… My mother had our property logged of all its timber / so I could move away and learn to write poetry.” This is stunning metaphorical work, and it shows Candrilli’s poetic sophistication. The transformation of the trees into pulp so that the young writer might be able to go and write the poetry to fill the blank pages so often produced by logging is a spectacular metaphorical leap. Candrilli is a skilled poet; they know their craft, its limitations, and they know how to shape the raw material of observation into artful poetry. Kaur doesn’t (yet) have this skill. Yet, I find it instructive to compare the two writers, whom I believe are ultimately addressing similar subject matter (from drastically different perspectives) and addressing an audience that is more similar than it is different. Both writers convey the experience of living in a body maligned by society (Kaur writes about the ways the “pussy” is defamed by men, while Candrilli writes about their breasts as trash, while loving what remains), and both writers struggle to find self-acceptance beyond self-loathing.
Hidden in Candrilli’s book are some stunners, but like Kaur’s Home Body, I had to carefully seperate it from the chaff. In “On Traveling Together” the speaker sees two boys cuddling on the couch in a motel room, and they jump when the speaker passes: “It’s clear by the ways the boys/ jump as I walk by: / their parents know nothing. / The floor is lava. / The continental / breakfast will start soon. / The couch they’re on is an island / I’ve been to.” No man is an island, as John Donne once famously wrote. The difficulty of being different, of hiding one’s true self when one is young, and the painful isolation it creates, is Candrilli’s subject—the illusion of the island.
There are poems shocking and heartbreaking, like “On Having Forgotten to Recycle” where the speaker writes about their breasts sent “to soak in an offshore landfill” perhaps “floating alongside jellyfish or plastic straws.” Several times in the book the breasts are rendered as waste, as refuse, and while the metaphor shocks, it invites the reader inside the experience of a body resisting the body’s parts in a way that is difficult to read and also enlightening. There’s a heartbreaking self-loathing in many of these poems. I’d hardly compare removed breasts (“biological waste”) to the more permanent and less biodegradable plastic waste spiraling in the Pacific, killing animals as we speak, but I feel like I can grasp something of what the speaker is trying to convey: a sense of disgust, self-destruction from within, unproductive waste, and loss. Later the speaker imagines their partner’s “ovarian cysts” fertilizing “a garden.” This creates an interesting distinction between the cysts and the breasts; fertilizer waste is productive, while the speaker’s breast waste, like unrecycled plastic, will never be productive. Candrilli writes: “It’s true that we can hold / just about everything inside us, whether we want to or not.” There sum of these small descriptions are devastating to read, but offer an important narrative of the self, undergoing transformation.
Candrilli writes: “I do not regret my body / but I regret the hands of most / who have touched it.”
Some of these poems take the breath away quite literally: “Just before my double mastectomy / my partner asked whether the surgeon would open / me deep enough to see / my heart.” Candrilli writes: “I imagine a knife blade / is what has come closest to my core– / a violent scraping of breast / tissue from muscle / that still aches / months and months later.” There is a violent and ever-present materialism to these poems—the sense that the self is the body and the body is the self. There is no spirit, no ghost in the machine. There’s something terrifying about this, but also something wonderful in the poet’s refusal to perform metaphysical gymnastics. Later, in the best and most artful poem in the book, “Transgender Heroic: All This Ridiculous Flesh” the speaker contemplates their hands and writes: What happens now / will matter later and I would like / to be proud of myself.” This is one of the most stunning transformations in the book. Up to this point, the body has undergone so much transformation: breast into trash, breast into biological waste, body into more acceptable form, but here, the hands become matter, too. All that is body eventually becomes not-alive. The hands become the possibility of matter, the possibility of waste. In a purely materialist poetry, all that matters is now. The body is matter, either breast matter that fills a landfill, and hands are also material that will die. But for now, the hands are theirs and they matter. Candrilli’s transformations are sublime and rooted on earth.
Still, there are some unfortunate experiments in this book. Anyone can write a sestina if you let the line go on long enough, and Candrilli lets the line go on long enough in “Sestina Written as Though Genesis.” There are gems here, but they are buried within a poem that feels like it’s trying to do too much at once, without having quite earned that muchness.
Yet, the poetic transgressions can be forgiven. Candrilli writes: “I believe that / had I known one trans person / as a child, I’d have half as many scars / as an adult. I could have come / around to this body so much sooner.”
The power of literature is that it allows us, for a brief moment, to step inside lives so different from our own. The power of literature is that sometimes, we find ourselves lying on the floor, gut-punched with awful relief to learn we are not alone. My hope for Candrilli’s poetry is that there will be trans teens and youth out there who will find it, and find in this poetry a kindred spirit—and perhaps start writing poetry of their own.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.