elegy For [lukas] – luna rey hall

“luna rey hall’s elegy for [lukas] is like watching a wave gather power, but close-up: fragmentary, lyric, narrative, and always human, these poems rise and fall and carry us along. How wonderful to be held by something much greater than ourselves!”

—Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry

“My favorite poems are the ones in which I am permitted my own radiance. luna rey hall’s elegy for [lukas] is filled with poems that allow my radiance and allow, too, the radiance of all the queers who find their way to this gorgeous work. hall writes ‘there is a universe where i am… there is a universe where I am…’ and we are so lucky it’s this one.”

—Kayleb Rae Candrilli, author of Winter of Worship

“With a deft balance of devastation and beauty which is quickly becoming their signature, luna rey hall has crafted a wildly expansive, sometimes wrenching and ultimately moving elegy to a once-lived-in self, put to rest so the truth can live. Even in its brevity, this collection builds worlds of possibility—zombie apocalypses and trans extinction scenarios, multiverses of motherhood—and perhaps most extraordinary of all, a fully embodied life in all its wild and prosaic wonder, where ‘a body walks into a bar/ &/ I’m starting to recognize it.’ elegy for [lukas] is a tenderly wrought collection that is not to be missed.”

—Jihyun Yun, author of And the River Drags Her Down

“elegy for [lukas] flashes with brutality and mercy, fury and yearning. In agile, flickering couplets, luna rey hall grieves for unlived timelines and the often mazy, exhausting choreography of trans survival. But in true elegiac form, they also remind us of all the things that hold us, and hold us here: softness and snapdragons, fuchsia and sparrows, the possibility of a future where our entire self can finally thrive, the heaven of being known for who we have always been.”

—Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater