“this chapbook will make you want to listen to LaBelle, touch the lines on your chest, and thank god and the gays for good poetry”
– KB Bookins, Lambda Literary Award winning author of Pretty: A Memoir
About Out of Yearning
In OUT OF YEARNING, Black trans poet Cai Sherley transforms yearning into revelation. These luminous poems navigate gender transition, Black ancestry, family, music, grief, and ecstatic self-discovery through forms as inventive as their vision. By turns intimate and celebratory, Sherley's work refuses shame in favor of embodiment, tenderness, and the powerful act of claiming the body as one's own. A stunning debut, Out of Yearning marks the arrival of a vital new voice in contemporary American poetry, one we believe will help carry the art form into its future.
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“Quick, there’s new sermon and illumination out and Cai Sherley ushers all of it! Across delineations of space and time, Out Of Yearning takes vulnerability and precision, channeling Black and trans innovations with a memorable poignancy. Each line is a beckoning and reveling, catapulted by elation and grief in a breathtaking rotation. As a consummate poet, Cai doesn’t just explore but unfurl with a poetic craft that cascades and questions utilizing various forms—cento, triolet, haiku, ghazal, and more genre-bending skill seamlessly at his disposal. Through ghosts, song, and future making, readers will feel altered and can’t help but re-consider what it means to not only to dream, but to map lineages with your full chest, with scars and all. What a celebration: What a supreme debut work!”
“If “songs are telephone wires to the dead,” as Cai Sherley tells us, then Out of Yearning is an entire album of chants to a universe of trans hearts—past, present, and future. They do so with physicality and gorgeous lyric, filled with the sacred work of loving ourselves and those like us. I can honestly say I have been deeply changed by these poems.”
“There is a colorful, ethereal syncopation to Cai’s corporeal excavations; in his work, like the tenderest fingertips ghosting over new scar tissue, we find a new rhythm of becoming. Equal parts Black jubilee and reverent solemnity, Out of Yearning finds its voice through whispering the burgeoning, impelling truths-of-self and bellowing the sorrowful hymnals of those truths gone long unsung. Cai displays an uncanny dexterity of craft, an unflinching fidelity to bearing witness, and an unrelenting penchant for dreaming. Out of Yearning is bursting, elegiac—and truly, it is poetry for healing.”
“Out of Yearning is a delightfully trans set of poems that feel like a deep breath. With formal versatility and inventive syntax (“Laughter spills like gin from glasses / Ringwormed with salt”), this chapbook will make you want to listen to LaBelle, touch the lines on your chest, and thank god and the gays for good poetry.”