In this remarkable inaugural collection, Kelly Grace Thomas reminds us water is where we are from, water is what we are made of, and water is where we'll return. These formally dexterous poems invite the reader to consider how the craft of a poem is a physical object that helps keep us afloat. Boat Burned interrogates the moment where the embodied spirit butts up against the strictures and violence of an impossible world. This is an urgent new collection from an urgent new voice.

-sam sax, author of Bury It

A "tendertangle," a lush portmanteau, is how I drank and devoured the water-drenched poems of Kelly Grace Thomas's Boat Burned. This mercy-hearted work shows great concern and empathy for the twisted mess and mass of bodies-bodies as boats, bodies burning, body as a window, the lover's body, and the parental body as a woven elegy and ode. This gorgeous debut is a sustained symphonic metaphor on what we carry in our vessels, all the damage and joy (inherited and otherwise) sailing and sinking and singing through magnificent verse. Thomas is a master of intense precision of feeling. The diction is hungry and barking "for anything to love us back." I am beyond excited for this brilliant and beautiful collection.

-Tiana Clark, author of I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood

At the same time expansive and intimate, Kelly Grace Thomas's debut collection navigates issues of loss, family, and agency. Boat Burned invites us to witness the pains and subsequent joys of rebirth-"The boats that built me / smoke on shore." Thomas's voice shines like a lighthouse beacon-guiding us through the difficult memories and toward the future's open waters.

-Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck

"History is a dirty / ocean. And I am dangerous / with thirst," says luminous poet Kelly Grace Thomas, in her spellbinding Boat Burned. The gorgeous poems that populate this powerful collection "rise // fully formed from sea." These are elegant, crisp, clear, and potent poems that tackle such issues as impossible beauty standards, eating disorders, racist attitudes in the U.S., divorce, and family trauma, all while binding a thickly knotted rope of love between the speaker and her family, the speaker and the world around her.

-Jennifer Givhan, author of Rosa's Einstein