Bad Forecast is a hybrid memoir set in Missouri, concerning childhood memories of a tornado that kills many people, including the boy that the young poet was romantically attached to. This is a brilliant collection on several levels. Steffan Triplett goes deep—very deep—in terms of understanding the genesis of his sexuality and in terms of the psychodynamics of childhood. Bad Forecast is a très queer collection in that it explores a childhood love between boys but, on a deeper level, it queers several boundaries: between prose and poetry, between past and present, between dream and reality, between imagination and fiction.

Usually, writers use a literary form to explore narrative and theme: here Triplett continuously explores the same narrative by coming at it with a variety of forms to discern the truth, as if one form is not sufficient to hold the whole truth.

I sense a variety of literary influences at play, which may or may not be there: clearly Langston Hughes, possibly Tennessee Williams (particularly Sweet Bird of Youth and Suddenly Last Summer), Chekhov (the gun), W. G. Sebold (the deliberate admixture of reality, dream and pseudo biography). If I was a gambling gal, I would wager a twenty on Triplett having read W. G. Sebold. The Chekhovian gun, though, is deliberate. It appears in Slumber Party, and then goes off in Flood, and in a dream in Adventures, with the poet shooting (or dreaming of shooting) himself in the head and also with a boy being shot in the heart.

Time is queered: there is teleportation and telescoping, jumping back and forwards in dreams from the present to the past to the distant past at Triplett’s whim. This is as unpredictable and exciting as real life and the human brain.

Race is always present—as it is in life in the USA—and makes its presence felt in Bad Forecast, being addressed directly in Middle Seat where the young black protagonist is seated between two white people. In Talk Therapy, the poet is older and processing with his young friends the micro aggressions of being black in the USA. They joke and mess around, yell and scream to express their frustration and rage.

The Mole is a long poem, adding new lines and repeating others in a form/pattern like a pantoum. There are pastoral, childhood, and neighborhood recollections here but also something untoward inserted, a specter of consent/safety/coercion: tell him no one more time. It’s unclear and hard to understand, in the same way as childhood sexualization is confusing to a young person. Triplett puts us, the readers, into that childhood mindset. Extremely effective writerly technique is on display here.

The book ends with a remarkable piece, Something Like Time, which is a suite of prose poems again playing with time in that it is told in the present but lapses into childhood moments at whim. Certain lines repeat in this suite, in which the father runs over the family cat and the cat’s legs are broken. The mother also falls and breaks her leg and the poet contemplates injury, death, childhood, growing maturity and his own past, full of trauma. It ends on a positive note with the grown-up author in the ocean with his friends: The water is warm. I gaze into the moon. I am buoyant amongst the waves.

Bad Forecast is available here.