On Living Through Grief, & (Re)Discovering Joy: A Review of K. Iver’s Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco
It is very, very rare to come across a book that both breaks your heart and mends it. And yet, this is exactly what K. Iver’s Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco did for me.
Here is a debut about grief and gender and longing, a book about survival, but most importantly, a book that reaches, even as it is breaking, towards joy. While Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco is, on the surface, about two people — a child “assigned ‘woman’” and Missy, a boy “forced to call / himself a girl” who dies by suicide — in writing their story, Iver collectivizes their grief. For the speaker of these poems holds their readers even as they ask to be held.
I first read K. Iver’s poetry in TriQuarterly, and was struck, instantly, at the power of their words. “Family of Origin Content Warning,” first published in the Winter 2022 Issue of TriQuarterly, appears as the third poem in Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco. Here, the poem establishes a dilation of time and point of view that will encompass the book. For the speaker of “Family of Origin Content Warning” tells us: “This poem/may unfold, in detail, a husband’s violence/ toward a wife. May run time in a circle,” and through these three lines, is able to both stretch time and introduce a reliable unreliability central to the process of trauma and grief around which Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco orbits.
Iver’s power comes from where they tell us to look, and, by extension, what they tell us to look away from. While many of the poems in Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco are elegiac love poems, the book is, like the titles suggests, also a film: playing a reel of the past for its readers to bear witness to, so that we can better understand how we have come to this present, and more importantly, through circling the absence of Missy, how we might “pretend” and dream of a present and a future that is different, a universe in which Missy still lives. A large part of this occurs through the direct second-person addressal Iver employs in poems like “Boy Meets Them,” where the speaker says: “if you were here/on my porch stoop, our kids playing inside,/I’d come out to you first, like I am on the page/right now.”
Through this practice of direct addresal, Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco establishes itself as a conversation: between the speaker and their audience, between the speaker and their mother in poems like “Jane” and “a mother’s advice,” between the present and the relentlessly unspooling river of the past, and, most importantly, between the speaker and Missy, as occurs explicitly in the poem “[Boy] Meets Girl.” These conversations, and the queer imagining that they necessitate, allow us to experience the process of grief as nonlinear, and, as the speaker of “Anti Elegy” tells us, at times “righteous/ & problematic.” They introduce us to a “grief habit” that asks in the sequence, “Who Is This Grief For?”: “what’s wrong with a little/pain? Who else does it pain?”
In an interview for Palette Poetry, Iver quotes Claire Schwartz, saying, “When someone dies, our relationship with them doesn’t stop. It just changes.” Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco is a book obsessed with documenting this change. And, like all obsessions, the book circles and grounds itself in specific memories and artifacts: Missy’s Red Bronco, the speaker’s memory of when Missy “offered [them]/an open pack of Reese’s Pieces,” the poem’s contemporary retelling of fairy tales, the speaker’s past practice of ballet.
In the book’s final poem, “Because You Can’t,” the speaker says, “Missy, this is me moving on.” Describing to Missy how they live now: “strok[ing hawk’s] mid-flight,” “let[ting] comets land in [their] mouth” the speaker calls back to the queer garden of Eden introduced in the book’s very first poem, and paints for Missy and their reader the beginning of a world, of a life in a trans body that has rediscovered, or at the very least, is in the process of rediscovering joy.
Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco is a book about grief, but it is also a book about forgiveness: for the speaker’s mother, for Missy, and most importantly, for the speaker’s own self. As a queer writer living in Tennessee, where the rights of queer people are under attack every single day, Iver’s book is a reminder of what I write towards. It has allowed me to forgive myself in ways I’d not thought possible. Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco is a book that I know I will return to again and again, for, even as it brings me to tears, it guides me towards joy, pushes me to work for a world in which Missy might have survived. A world where “they love us here” not just now, but always.
