{"product_id":"short-film-starring-my-beloveds-red-bronco-9781639550609","title":"Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco","description":"\u003cp class=\"Normal1\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eShort Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cb\u003e, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry,\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eis an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp class=\"Normal1\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn small-town Mississippi, before the aughts, a child “assigned ‘woman’” and a boy “forced to call \/ himself a girl” love one another—from afar, behind closed doors, in motels. The child survives an injurious mother and the beast-shaped men she brings home; the boy becomes a soldier. Years later, the boy—the eponymous beloved, Missy—dies by suicide, kicking up a riptide of memory. This is where K. Iver writes, at the confluence of love poem and elegy.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp class=\"Normal1\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“I say to the water if you were here, \/ you’d be here.” With cinematic precision, they conjure dorm-room landlines, the lingering sweetness of shared candy, a ballet strap and “soft \/ fingers tracing it, afraid to touch \/ the skin.” They punctuate depictions of familial abuse and the cruel politics of the Deep South with fairy tales: a girl who endures abuse refusing to grow into a mother who inflicts it herself, queer youth kissing fearlessly, bodies transcending the violence of a reductive gender binary. In these fantasies, “there’s no \/ reason to leave town no hidden \/ torches waiting for us to fall asleep.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp class=\"Normal1\"\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003ci\u003eShort Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e sees us through a particular kind of grief—one so relentless, it’s precious. It presses us, also, to continue advocating for a world in which queer love fantasies become reality and queer love poems “swaddle the impossible \/ contours of joy.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"K. Iver","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48284526510331,"sku":"9781639550609","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0779\/3917\/9771\/files\/CoreSourceHub_682cb80c-e4d0-418d-b5a7-9689fe9056e7.jpg?v=1776098551","url":"https:\/\/indiepubs.com\/products\/short-film-starring-my-beloveds-red-bronco-9781639550609","provider":"IndiePubs","version":"1.0","type":"link"}