Praise for Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco"Iver's fierce, sad debut collection offers a queer coming-of-age story and an elegy for the speaker's beloved, a trans man from Mississippi who killed himself at 27. The book embraces the fluidity of language and gender alike."–New York Times"A gripping debut . . . an elegiac coming of age story . . . . The most beautiful moments in this collection are of celebration, as when the two lovers, kept apart against their will, play the radio on boomboxes over a landline"–Poetry Foundation's Harriet Books"Iver's poems acknowledge the limits of their own fantasizing, they adamantly support the vitality of trans reality...In this entanglement of transness and elegy, reality and fantasy intertwine to assess the transformative power of desire and its limits."–Megan Milks, Poetry Foundation "Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco is one of the mostpowerful excavations of grief in recent memory, a genderqueer kaddish that
veers from guilt ('I have a body / and you don't') to despair to tenderness to
searing anger... Iver's poems will turn you inside out."–Jonathan
Miles, Garden and Gun"K. Iver's debut collection, Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco is a book of living-through. Here the elegy is not embodied as form but as mode: the death of a loved one is not a subject but an experience that resists conclusion and shapes the perspective of all experiences thereafter."– C.T. Salazar, RHINO Magazine "[Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco] is both elegiac and celebratory, a fierce love
song about queer resilience, as well a mourning song about familial abuse and
the violence inherent in the gender binary."–Laura Sackton, Book Riot"The poems are truly in a league of their own; I've never read another book like this one. Such a magnetically raw exploration of grief is a gift–and a comfort, to those who seek it."–Jami Padgett, Arkansas International"K. Iver's Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco is a gleaming counter-narrative of gender, place, and class. Framed by grief and longing, the poet's vivid and eclectic imagination sprawls through each poem, wrestling with mortality and ideas of transgression. The versatility of images, and the bright energy that pervades and suffuses this work, is a triumph."–Tyehimba Jess"What happens to our present when we hold ourselves in the past? K. Iver's debut collection, Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco, is a beautiful and heartbreaking answer. Reading these poems is like watching a dancer analyze their performance repeatedly on a big TV, pausing to circle mistakes with a red marker–'This is where I go wrong'–until the marker coats the entirety of the screen. Grief colors everything–and still Iver fights to bring joy to the surface. You need to read this book; you've been waiting for it your whole life."–Paige Lewis"Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco is equal ...
