Kayla Thompson | Spring 2026

“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.” Widely attributed to Aristotle, I kept returning to this quote as I read Kelsey L. Smoot’s debut full-length collection, SOULMATE AS A VERB. 

Described as “poems of tender knowledge, buoyant survival, and Black, trans embodiment,” Smoot’s poetry is deeply committed to accessing and intimating this “vital truth.” From sprawling, emotionally lyric poems, to poetic formal experiments, to more compact poems exhibiting skillfully employed pacing and sound (see the lovely “Agnostic”), SOULMATE AS A VERB traverses a wide gamut of topics. Whether touching on origins, identity, the personal, the communal, estrangement, joy, grief, or other topics entirely, Smoot treats all subjects as equally important, to be treated with the utmost respect, care, tenderness, and (above all) love. 

SOULMATE AS A VERB deftly shifts between discussions of its central concerns, making connections, pointing out the intimacies and affinities across four sections of the collection: “Chest,” “Ribs,” “Lungs,” and “Heart.” Rather than separating the body into parts, the poems in the collection insist on a kind of embodiment, connection, and agency that coheres disparate threads, that insists on a vital, unified self that transcends division. After all, it is only when these parts are taken together, when they are working in tandem, that the body and the self can operate. 

Jericho Brown describes Smoot, in praise for SOULMATE AS A VERB, as “an alchemist of Black vernacular and a believer in Black people.” This description is incredibly apt, as is apparent across the collection. SOULMATE AS A VERB opens, in fact, on one such instance: a powerful note of collectivity, cohesion, and ancestry, with the poem “Black Idioms & Euphemisms.” The first line of the piece is “Truth is, all Black people are poets.” What greater act of love and belief is there than this insistence? 

This kind of love, tending, and faith is insisted on, even if subtly, across the collection, with these core tenets undergirding each poem. It is evident also in the care with which Smoot pays homage to, and invokes, literary ancestors and inspirations. With epigraphs from writers such as Octavia E. Butler, Toni Morrison, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde, and poems written after or invoking writers like Danez Smith, Refaat Alareer, Yrsa Daley-Ward, and Patricia Smith, it is clear that Smoot is deeply invested in honoring and extending the work of his poetic ancestors, handling and building upon their work with respect, esteem, and care. 

I could write, perpetually and at length, about Kelz’s invocation of poetic and writerly lineages, as well as how it complements their poetic rendering of Black Trans and Black Queer experience, but I’d now like to turn to the talent and quality of the original writing in the collection itself. 

SOULMATE AS A VERB is a powerful showcase of Smoot’s formal dexterity. Across the collection, they work both within and against formal constraints with great success. Readers will encounter and recognize traditional and established forms such as the cento, ghazal, golden shovel, sestina, sonnet, quatern, and kwansaba, among others. Even as Smoot engages with the most traditional of these forms, they do so while infusing the tradition with their own singular, unapologetic, and unflinching voice. This is apparent in poems such as “Chest Binder Bliss // Top Surgery Blues,” where Smoot engages the convention of concrete poetry to explore identity, visualization, and relationship to the body, with the typographical arrangement of the poem forming the shape of a binder. 

Elsewhere in SOULMATE AS A VERB, Smoot experiments formally through the introduction of other visual and multimedia representations as poetic material. I am thinking here not only of the deeply moving and materially engaged blackout poems in the collection (such as “Masculinity & Femininity” and “Black Trans Man Killed by Police in Florida” (the latter of which honors the life of Tony McDade), but also of great visually experimental poems such as “Searching” and “Falling.” Even as “Falling” falls within the category of blackout poetry, it invents and surprises, offering a new avenue for exploration within the genre as it engages the practice of blackout poetry via the multimedia medium of a voicemail transcript. 

Smoot’s ability to move between different modes and forms seamlessly, idiosyncratically, and with grace demonstrates a deep knowledge of poetic tradition as well as a deep commitment to the wonder and magic of poetry altogether. As a whole, the formal range of the collection mirrors, and is a testament to, the range of Smoot’s poetic talents. 

Among other talents apparent across the collection are clever, strong, and moving titles, such as “The Body (In Theory),” “Stories We Tell Ourselves,” “The Revolution Might Not Be Televised,” “Self-Portrait as Pi,” and “My Pulse, the Unreliable Narrator.” Titles across SOULMATE AS A VERB are often expertly chosen framing devices that allow Smoot to explore freely, ramp up to, and also move beyond, the poem’s founding or initial concept. I am thinking here of “Light Rail,” written after Jessica Abughattas, which begins:

The heart isn’t interested in change
The heart wishes to return to the site of love
over and over,
finding everything in its proper place

While there is no initial mention or immediately perceived connection to the “light rail,” the poem builds from here, accumulating details and characteristics of the “heart,” working itself into a kind of litany before ending on the lines:

The heart isn’t interested in life as a highway,
The heart prefers a train track, a light rail
The heart needs to know where it’s headed
needs to be able to find its way back

In this way, as well as through a variety of methods and movements, Smoot’s poems across SOULMATE AS A VERB are excellently accomplished. 

Matters of the heart recur in various modalities across the collection. While there are a number of poems that explore the heart through love, romantic connection, and desire, an abundance of poems also approach matters of the heart through the lens of platonic love and the centrality of community. In “Twinkle Man,” Smoot writes “But I hope he knows as brothers of the diaspora / we will always find homes / in one another.” In this manner, “Twinkle Man” and poems across the collection extend a hand to not only personae that populate the book, but also to readers and communities across the world. In no place is this more apparent than “Parable of the Innocent, or Black Trans-Boi Roadmap,” where Smoot powerfully and emotionally asserts the following wish: “If this poem could / [reach] / anyone, I would want it to be a child who has not yet known suffering.” This line is touching and heartrending, representative of the way Smoot’s poetry reaches out to community, rather than excluding or operating insularly, and attempts to soothe, give love, bring joy, and shed shame even as it points out the sticking points of our lived realities. 

Again, I could write an endless amount of praise for Kelsey L. Smoot’s poetics, and for the poems that appear in their debut collection, SOULMATE AS A VERB, but I’ll end my thoughts on the following note. The epigraph to the “Lungs” section of Smoot’s collection is sourced from June Jordan’s Some of Us Did Not Die: Selected Essays: “Something has to be done about the way in which this world is set up.” 

This collection is centrally concerned with what to do about the way in which this world is set up, and Smoot’s poetry aims, at least partially, to find a solution. We start by reaching out to each other, by extending our hearts and hands to both those who have not yet known suffering and those who have felt our suffering, those who know it intimately. We don’t leave each other to face those hurts on our own. 

Returning once more to the structure of SOULMATE AS A VERB, it is fitting that this collection ends on the section “Heart,” that it ends on a section organized around the principle of “Heart,” after so many interrogations of the heart’s inner workings. It’s a helpful reminder of the primacy of matters of the heart, both physical and metaphysical. It’s a helpful takeaway: SOULMATE AS A VERB has heart. This collection has heart.