Poetry Review: How to Identify Yourself with a Wound

KB’s How to Identify Yourself with a Wound is ponderous, yet weightless. There is such deep promise in the book’s romanticization of the poet’s world. Somehow, the pages communicate secrets forever untold; never to be revealed, even to KB themself. The collection reads like the story your best friend tells you, as you hold hands in the dark, about the time that they lost their virginity. It feels like hearing from an adult that magic isn’t real, but believing in it anyway-because, intuitively, you understand that your spirit’s vitality depends on your own faith and imagination. KB can tell us what happened the first time they were penetrated; they can tell us that they still believe in magic. But they’ll never be able to tell us what those experiences mean or why they matter. And that’s precisely what makes their poetry special. How to Identify Yourself With A Wound reads like lyrics to a song you’ve heard in both your dreams and your nightmares. The words are like sand slipping through your fingers, leaving you with only those all-too-familiar feelings of desire, shame, pride, and discomfort and a guilt that’s too powerful to transcend. KB reminds us that, as with most things in life, you had to be there.

How to Identify Yourself with a Wound intertwines memory, angst, and love to paint the complexity of identity, in general, and to tell the story of a particular coming-to-self. Sometimes, it feels as though KB is in a place they shouldn’t be; a place too dangerous for any of us to occupy. No one in their orbit seems to name the danger outright. No one bats an eye at their clear drowning, but the reader is compelled to scream and demand their release from an unacceptable bondage, an unimaginable plight. Though it isn’t fair, the reader is offered a glimpse at how beautiful KB has been rendered by their experience, a reward that feels unwarranted given the failure to save them from trauma’s grasp. This whiplash is a testament to how gritty and palpable KB’s offerings are.

In this collection, its the sensation of barely scratching the surface that resonates most and I like that HTIYWAW leaves you with so many more questions than answers, making you realize that you, yourself, are unfinished. After reading “self portrait as Frank Ocean song about drugs”, I can literally feel myself in the truck with KB and a girl they made orgasm at some unidentified age (though the scene they describe screams high school angst.) It makes me horny and uncomfortable, but doesn’t invite me to question why that might be. My breath catches in my throat when the guy in “First Boyfriend” touches KB without their consent. It brings me to reflect on moments of unspeakable violence that are almost perpetrated and to wonder whether or not those moments have some kind of cumulative effect on one’s soul. How traumatic are the experiences that systemic racism and toxic, Black culture make common? How is it possible to understand one’s self to be hyper-recognizable while also feeling utterly alien? In “Notes on Sexual Experiment,” “Two Truths and a Lie,” and “Self Portrait As Pangea,” you can feel the chaos that anchors KB’s loneliness, the depths of which it feels like they’ve only begun to explore. It’s an indication of KB’s authenticity that How to Identify Yourself with a Wound doesn’t force an answer to the questions that linger or attempt to dissect the author’s experience. I, too, have said I love you from a place of scarcity. That kind of chaos -the kind you exist within when your family has abandoned you, when it’s difficult to accept yourself because of the devastating rejection you continue to survive- is terrifyingly inexplicable; only to be captured by inquiry and perpetually eluding concretization.

My favorite piece in this collection is “I Miss the Women’s Restroom,” where KB proclaims that they “feel [their] most manly saying nothing when [they] should.” This is so poignant and explores the treachery and self betrayal one feels when they assimilate to a culture that has harmed them, violently rejected them, and assaulted their humanity. It also explores the harm reduction one experiences among people who are not quite allies and not quite enemies. These are not relationships for which gender nonconforming folx should have to settle. And they are dynamics of which we should all be ashamed.

But pain and crisis and chaos aren’t all KB has to offer in HTIYWAW. Their words give life to real love and, even, its illusion; illustrating how connection can be the single reprieve from the hellscapes we regularly inhabit. Our world complicates and bastardizes the gorgeous simplicity of love, friendship, and desire that KB so masterfully captures. After reading this collection, I can’t help but feel further charged with the responsibility of crafting a society that preserves the lucidity of intimacy’s value. We must acknowledge that people deserve to be supported through their grief, through the transformation that sorrow can catalyze. Ultimately, this collection reminds us that the human experience is heavy and that each of us are entitled to tribes and villages that deeply commit themselves to lightening the load.