FLOWER BOI

ISBN: 978-1-938900-47-1
Release Date: Spring 2023
Perfect-bound
49 pages, 5.3” x 7”
Read Press Release (PDF)

SYNOPSIS & EXCERPT

In a series of poems, FLOWER BOI operates as a coming of age tale centering a Black Queer and Trans experience in Detroit.

You were the beautiful thing,

who, before being called to dinner,

dug your hands deep

into the yard’s soft belly

pulled the writhing worm and too

snapped its head before burying it

into the same ground you disturbed.

–”Flower Boi”

PRAISE

A nature diary—in which it is human nature up for exploration—MARS Marshall’s FLOWER BOI utilizes received formal conventions in order to articulate that which resists the limitations of form or, as the poet puts it, “how space can be both void and / full is a trick only the BOI knows well.” Trick? No, there are no tricks or gimmicks here; this is a poet of ravishing innovation. The vowel, that “O” at the center of Marshall’s BOI, is passageway (“I try to make a map of my body / See which roads lead me to drink from / a river made by my hands…”); is apostrophe (“You, who turn your palms upward, gaze at the sky, proclaim I leave myself at the mercy of you…”); and is, at last, a hero’s journey from hole to whole to “How holy it is, to grab light of us and say, friend….” I can’t imagine a world where every debut is as fearless and brazen as Marshall’s FLOWER BOI.

—Tommye Blount, author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue

AUTHOR

MARS is a writer and cultural organizer born and raised in Detroit. Their work has been published in Obsidian Literature & Arts for the African Diaspora, Michigan Quarterly Review: The Mixtape, Foglifter Journal, Gertrude Press, and elsewhere. MARS is a 2021 Kresge Arts in Detroit – Literary Arts Fellow in Poetry and a 2019 Lambda Literary Arts Emerging Writers Fellow in Poetry.

DESIGNER

Book design by Sandra Rosales.