Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco
K. Iver
Reviewed by Jami Padgett
Winner of the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, K. Iver’s Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco is the poet’s debut collection, and an intimate tribute to “Missy,” the speaker’s transmasc beloved who “never got his new name” and died by suicide. Iver’s poems meditate on cycles of abuse, queer love, collective griefs and traumas—the undercurrents that led the speaker to where they ultimately leave us.
The collection complicates its own elegiac beat. Look to “Anti Elegy,” its lines split almost into half-lines, as though the caesuras might forge a route from top to bottom—like some kind of fracture or crack of the heart. Almost stubbornly, the poem imagines how the world would be with Missy still in it: “You might’ve / struck the impos- sible: surgery, / a new name, your own boat, & / someone beautiful to name it after.” But the speaker quarrels with the ethics of their grief, which they describe as “righteous / & problematic.”
After terming their grief “a loose dam,” they write, “Still, I talk to water that unrivered / your body for dirt. I float fantasies / of dirt that holds us up. Longer. / I say to the water if you were here, / you’d be here.”
So, too, the pauses in the poem’s lines come to “re-river” the body of the speaker’s beloved; the speaker takes the matter into their own hands.
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.
This collection couldn’t come at a better time, needed amidst heightening anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiments and attacks on trans healthcare, as well as trans lives. After reading this book, each time I see a headline that sears my heart, I think of a particular moment in Iver’s poem, “Mississippi, Missing, Missy, Miss—”: “That is to say I am inconsolable. / Every day a new definition // of inconsolable. Yesterday: I have a body / and you don’t. Today: your villain is a place.”