[11/04/25] brown, dezireé a.: They/she/he: Ritual to Forget Your (un)becoming

Host Publications, paperback

Publication Date: November 4, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 

they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming by dezireé a. brown is a momentous debut, tracking a self-proclaimed anti-hero’s quest for liberation through the transformative ritual of writing through the past, present, and future. Influenced by video game worlds, choose-your-own adventures, and a multifaceted collective of Mesopotamian goddesses, this collection is a conjuring of selves encountered through gender, and they arise to meet one another in all their Black queer joy and rage.

Communing with an ancestry of writers, healers and found family, brown's collection maps the odyssey of a life lived in transition and serves as an archive of Black transmasc experience, of every burning crucible, and every hard-won survival. “NO SPECTATORS ALLOWED” they/she/he asserts, insisting on our implication in this narrative, inviting us to traverse the intricate worlds crafted through its experimental poetic forms.

From the lunar shadows of this history of (un)becoming, poems bloom with epic blossoms, offering a potion that restores life. brown’s is an ecopoetics that looks to both the ocean’s depths and the expanses between stars for new methods of reclamation. As Steven Dunn writes in his introduction, if you “engage with this book with an open heart and throat” you will be changed by “all its beauty, ugly, rage, transformation, and necessary self-empowerment.” This book is a collection of healing spells. It is a hand reaching out to you in the dark.

With an introduction by writer and professor Steven Dunn.