More than Organs

Praise

Named by the American Library Association as a 2021 Barbara Gittings Stonewall Honor Book in Literature

Lambda Literary Award finalist

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“I am so excited for this book, More Than Organs, by Kay Ulanday Barrett, a self-described queer brown Filipinx disabled transgender boi. In observation they are also a poet who through years of work is stepping into the peak of their powers. This well-crafted, necessary, and moving book of poetry is about hunger that is physical, spiritual, and queer. It is also a book that names, makes visible, and feeds those who’ve been erased, made voiceless, misgendered, colonized, and experienced various forms of violence. The poems in this collection are shaped into a song of survival and love. I was struck, too, by the poem dedicated to the victims of Orlando: ‘there were boys holding hands with other boys for the first time.’ Reading Kay’s work, I am reminded of the pioneering and important work of Pat Parker, wry, full of longing, grief, humor, and rage.”

— Pamela Sneed, author of Funeral Diva and Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery

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“‘What is hunger … but the carving out of emptiness.’ And so in their defiant poetry collection, More Than Organs, Kay Ulanday Barrett excavates and hollows out a queer, trans, brown body to expose, examine, and interrogate the difficulties and heartaches of such existence. What is discovered is forged out of anger, injustice, defiance and love. These shapeshifting poems are insistent and persistent in their brazen attempts at making flesh and whole the undefinable nature of gender, race and physical/social being. I admire their direct honesty, how they rage! And how ultimately ‘the body is a letter/folded backward, all strange angles, confessions.’”

— Joseph O. Legaspi, author of Threshold and Imago

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“Kay Ulanday Barrett’s More Than Organs journeys between the worlds of memory and the living, acting as a map that leads the reader into the sacred. Charting the space between ‘the kinship of hunger and pain,’ poem after poem refuses the reader rest as the lines grapple with tensions erupting from the queerest art of living. Sometimes joy; sometimes grief. Witness loss, legend, survival, betrayal—all canyons and mesas crafted in the topography of the heart—sear with honesty their testament to chronic pain and endurance against a toxic America. What a gift to drink deep these queer, brown, fiercely resisting poems and to crack open your palette. Reader, follow this fearless, vulnerable speaker into the magic and you will ‘want to lay down / and just / live in it.’”

— Rajiv Mohabir, author of The Cowherd’s Son and The Taxidermist’s Cut

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This book is exactly what we have been waiting for! Kay Ulanday Barrett unmasks all readers until we are set on fire together! Please— / Take off your helmet. / Welcome the storm. These poems are not from the future, but they are from a present most people are starting to wake to, and Barrett is the most extraordinary modern Virgil leading the way forward! If you ever ask me for an essential reading list, More Than Organs is at the top!

— CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death