Awkward-Rich, Cameron: Sympathetic Little Monster

Ricochet Editions, paperback

Publication Date: May 1, 2016

Publisher Marketing: 

2017 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Transgender Poetry. Through a combination of lyric, narrative, & fractured essay, SYMPATHETIC LITTLE MONSTER attempts to make a space & a shape for the little girl who haunts our cultural/ personal narratives about blackness & transmasculinity. As a trans coming-of-age text the work is intensely inward-focused, but it resists the imperative of linear autobiography. Instead, it uses the personal as a tool to explore what kind of thing a "self" is, its relation to trauma & objectification, & its capacity to be multiple.

Cameron Awkward-Rich’s debut is a stunning announcement of a voice that demands we move closer as much as it wishes we’d go away. The ornate emotional terrain of these poems is charted with the poet’s sometimes spare, sometimes wild, always skilled lyric. We are invited into a story Awkward-Rich suggests we “know the words” to, but damn if it doesn’t sound better when this poet tells us. As much about stillness as it is about transition, Sympathetic Little Monster is at once analytical, magical, confessional, dismissive, but ultimately, and simply, a collection breaking new ground in Trans, Queer, Black, and American Letters. For many, Awkward-Rich’s poems will burst open the mind, the heart, and even some doors, but when you get in there, just leave him alone.

– Danez Smith