they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming by dezireé a. brown

Winner of the 2025 Joe W. Bratcher Prize

they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming by dezireé a. brown is a momentous debut, tracking a self-proclaimed anti-hero’s quest for liberation through the transformative ritual of writing through the past, present, and future. Influenced by video game worlds, choose-your-own adventures, and a multifaceted collective of Mesopotamian goddesses, this collection is a conjuring of selves encountered through gender, and they arise to meet one another in all their Black queer joy and rage. 

Communing with an ancestry of writers, healers and found family, brown's collection maps the odyssey of a life lived in transition and serves as an archive of Black transmasc experience, of every burning crucible, and every hard-won survival. “NO SPECTATORS ALLOWED” they/she/he asserts, insisting on our implication in this narrative, inviting us to traverse the intricate worlds crafted through its experimental poetic forms.

From the lunar shadows of this history of (un)becoming, poems bloom with epic blossoms, offering a potion that restores life. brown’s is an ecopoetics that looks to both the ocean’s depths and the expanses between stars for new methods of reclamation.  As Steven Dunn writes in his introduction, if you “engage with this book with an open heart and throat” you will be changed by “all its beauty, ugly, rage, transformation, and necessary self-empowerment.” This book is a collection of healing spells. It is a hand reaching out to you in the dark. 

With an introduction by writer and professor Steven Dunn.

they/she/he: ritual to forget your (unbecoming) officially launches
& ships on November 4th! 
The first 100 pre-orders will be signed & receive limited-edition ephemera.

Through the use of fragmentation, spatial experimentation, polyvocalism, and radical narrativity, Dez Brown’s poems interrogate anti-Blackness, misogyny, transphobia, and nonbinary memory. Circling through spaces that are both personal and communal, they/she/he finds an aesthetic that viscerally interrogates the ways in which bodies break, heal, evolve, mourn, and become containers where grief and play are in a constant dance of desire. Here, theory lives in the body that changes, grows, and reverberates. The natural environment absorbs us and holds us in its tomb as we read this gamified index of destruction. These poems are about nothing less than the very essence of earthly survival and they are delivered with a moving, heartbreaking, deft, powerful touch. — Daniel Borzutzky, author of Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018

deziree a. brown's debut is at once speculative excavation and glorious incantation. At the crossroads of planted orchids and the "red ache of bone," brown's collection summons selves and ancestors across dimensions--holding tenderly that convergence of becoming and unbecoming, dissolution and (re-)emergence. While evocative in image, this work is not spectacle manufactured for consumption (so, as the collection forewarns, spectators begone!). This work is sacred practice in reverence to Black trans and queer shapeshifting. — Destiny Hemphill, author of motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life

Spell-binding, splendidly sticky, and stellar with sound and motion, they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming is the most magnificent “whispering / between stars. — m. mick powell, author of Dead Girl Cameo

dezireé a. brown (they/he) is a Black queer nonbinary Pushcart Prize–nominated poet, interdisciplinary scholar, and sjw, born and raised in Flint, MI. They are the winner of the Betty Stuart Smith Award from the University of Illinois Chicago, where they recently received their PhD in English with concentrations in Black Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies. He received an MFA from Northern Michigan University and he was a quarterfinalist in the 5th Annual Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowship. They recently served as the 2024 Editor-in-Chief at The Seventh Wave Magazine to curate a folio of creative writing and art focused on the video game genre, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Foglifter, wildness, Scalawag, Four Way Review, Obsidian, and the anthology A Garden of Black Joy: Global Poetry from the Edges of Liberation and Living, among others. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African & African-American Studies at Earlham College. Often claiming to have been born with a poem written across his chest, he spends much of his free time gaming and plays a mean hand of spades. 

✦ Select Online Publications ✦

✦ Foglifter Vol. 9, Issue I, “short film with the raw heads of potatoes”

✦ Scalawag, “etymology of flight — a venn diagram"

✦ Four Way Review, “I Love What My Eyes Have Laid Sight On”; “reverse supper.”;

“Almost Every Book of Poetry Has a Poem about Horses”

✦ Rough Cut Press, Issue 63, “Dez: Choose Your Own Adventure”

The Official they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming Playlist

120 pages
ISBN: 979-8-9905483-2-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025938555
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