AN ALIVE BOY, by Jude Armstrong

Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

"This is an invigorating collection of breathtaking, innovative forms with an utterly necessary voice. You’re going to want to read their first chapbook because it will be the first of many astounding, evocative collections. Jude is a future poetry star."

—Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of Bad Mexican, Bad American

"Visceral, vivid, and honest, AN ALIVE BOY by Jude Armstrong flits through the experience of assigned gender and into an internal space filled with introspection. A fleeting but meaningful glance at transmasculine coming-of-age, this chapbook lingers in the dirt of small-town life, asking the reader what it truly means to exist in a space and body that do not feel like home. And yet, there is also a thread of longing, both in the abstract and in its many manifestations. Armstrong writes from his perch in the sky, "bloodshot and staring," to compose both the end and the beginning of a life as it wants to be lived. This collection is a knockout.
—nat raum, author of preparatory school for the end of the world and the abyss is staring back

AN ALIVE BOY has a taut string of tension running through it; the kind that comes with growing up and never completely leaves. The series of eleven poems begins and ends with identity, the very nature of it: what it is, what it means, and the number of names we give to ourselves and others.

Fear and intimacy are spread out and slashed across the pages, entangling with each other in a mesmerizing dance. The sheer rawness of the fear and the accompanying intimacy of this fear forms a loose narrative about the complexity of humanity. This chapbook is, in itself, a layered metaphor for memory, for trust, and for everything to come.

Jude Armstrong is a young poet and founding editor of Verum Literary Press. He has been published in {new words press}, Corporeal Lit, Bullshit Lit, and is a part of the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship. When not directing school theater productions, he enjoys 80s music, a good film, and advocating for trans rights.