Listen, Kid

Listen, Kid gathers sixteen years of Bryan Borland's poetry into one sweeping, intimate, and fiercely human collection. Moving across love, lust, faith, grief, queer boyhood, marriage, family lineage, and the ghosts that shape a life, these poems trace the evolution of a Southern gay poet who refuses to look away from the hard things and refuses to write without tenderness.

Borland's work spans the mythic and the personal: altar boys and backseat boys, brothers living and lost, the ache of rural adolescence, the bright terror of first desire, the complexities of relationships, the politics of survival, and the long, startling work of growing into one's own body. Whether writing elegy or erotic memory, biblical remix or road-trip confession, he approaches every subject with clarity, vulnerability, humor, and reverence.

This is a book about becoming again and again, and about the people, places, and loves that make survival not only possible but luminous. Borland writes to the younger self who doesn't yet know how the story will turn out, and to the reader who needs to hear it: you belong, you endure, you matter.

Listen, Kid is a landmark collection from a poet and publisher whose work has shaped and sustained a generation of queer readers and writers.