How to Identify Yourself with a Wound - by Kb Brookins (Paperback)

About the Book

"As KB navigates burning issues of love, identity, race, and enforced gender, bearing witness to how intimacy can be a battleground, a declared truce, or an Eden, How to Identify Yourself with a Wound is never less than compelling and absorbing: 'Let me tell you the story of a tenderness the world refused to call / beautiful but it lives.' The powerful lines, the no-holds-barred voice, and risk-taking candor of these dynamic debut poems make the reader hungry for a whole volume."--

Book Synopsis

"As KB navigates burning issues of love, identity, race, and enforced gender, bearing witness to how intimacy can be a battleground, a declared truce, or an Eden, How to Identify Yourself with a Wound is never less than compelling and absorbing: 'Let me tell you the story of a tenderness the world refused to call / beautiful but it lives.' The powerful lines, the no-holds-barred voice, and risk-taking candor of these dynamic debut poems make the reader hungry for a whole volume."

"The poems in How to Identify Yourself with a Wound pull no punches. Raw honesty paired with concise language inhabit and fully embody a life shaped by the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender. This is my favorite kind of poetry, necessary and urgent, revealing and saving and healing and re-creating both poet and reader." -

Review Quotes

" Our identities are more than formal structures that can be easily cut and pasted into headline categories like race or gender or sexuality. They are a collection of moments and events that drive us, head first, into the only names left for what we are. KB's How to Identify Yourself with a Wound is a fresh and energetic examination of the transformative process known as self-inquiry. Without hesitation, KB digs into what is often left unsaid about the internal querying process that leads one to the identity of nonbinary. Readers can expect to witness the origins of an audacious and empowered advocate whose lyric and inquisitiveness bodes well for the future of poetry."

-Faylita Hicks, author of HOODWITCH