Listen, Kid: Selected & New Poems 2010-2026 by Bryan Borland (PRE-ORDER/HARDBACK)
Listen, Kid: Selected & New Poems 2010-2026
Arkansas Queer Poet Series #5
Copyright © 2026 by Bryan Borland
ISBN: 978-1-943977-88-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2026939195
Retail Price: $37.00
Publication Date: August 13, 2026
6 x 9” Hardback; 286 Pages
Cover photograph by the author.
Distributed by Ingram and Sibling Rivalry Press
Author is available for appearances and interviews
Author Website: www.bryanborland.com
Publisher Contact: [email protected]
Trade, library, and educational discounts available
Desk copies available for educators
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THIS IS A PRE-ORDER TITLE. Titles generally ship one week before their publication date.
Keywords: Gay Poetry, Queer Poetry, Southern Poetry, Gay Literature, LGBTQ+ Voices, Spiritual Poetry, Sexual Orientation, Overcoming Shame, Gay Marriage, Relationships, Family, Lineage, Arkansas
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.
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Bryan Borland is founding publisher of Sibling Rivalry Press and founding editor of Assaracus: A Journal of Gay and Queer Poetry. His most recent books include Brotherful (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2025), a finalist for the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the chapbook, Crow in the Desert (Queer Punk Collective, 2025). Previous titles include the chapbook, Tourist (2018), and three full-length collections of poems: My Life as Adam (2010), Less Fortunate Pirates: Poems from the First Year Without My Father (2012), and DIG (2016), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry and a Stonewall Honor Book in Literature as selected by the American Library Association. He is a Catalyze Fellow, a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, and a winner of the Judith A. Markowitz Emerging Writer Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation.