The Beast Comes to You as Smoke: Poems

By Quenton Baker

Hailed as "profoundly talented" by The Stranger, quenton baker's hypnotic and intoxicating new poetry collection asks, "What is it like to love and be loved in a body that the world sees as monstrous?"

The defining characteristic of a monster is that all violence visited upon it is righteous. "Monsters" threaten the logic of reality and so cannot be harmed, only vanquished. Black and trans folks share with monsters the fate of existing as bottomless receptacles for justified violence. Both live as liminal beings that both require and sustain myth, simultaneously defining the borders of what is and is not human.

baker's poems explore what it means when the reviled and the desired still must live, survive, love, and create the possibility of care, even if, for those who benefit from their abjection, they only exist as over-watched objects to be acted upon, as libidinal beings that haunt and excite from outside of time. These poems ask how desire functions when it is both an avenue for pleasure and care and an excuse for endless violence.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HB2TWNRD
• ISBN13: 9798888906552
• Release Date: April 2027
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Length: 72 Pages
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 2.0" x 6.0"