"The poems in How to Identify Yourself with a Wound pull no punches. Raw honesty paired with concise language inhabit and fully embody a life shaped by the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender. This is my favorite kind of poetry, necessary and urgent, revealing and saving and healing and re-creating both poet and reader." 

— ire’ne laura silva, author of CUICACALLI/House of Song, 2020 Saguaro Poetry Prize judge

"How to Identify Yourself with A Wound makes good on its promise to go directly to the source of pain, to explore & commune with it. As KB reminds us, “Slipping between genders sometimes causes a fall, after all.” These poems also tend to the wound caused by the fall, excavating sharp memories, naming the trauma for what it is, and making room for a love without limits. Read this book when you need a good cry, or a knowing look across the room: when you need to be reminded of what tethers you to yourself."

—Ariana Brown, author of We Are Owed.

“i have never known. how to identify myself with a wound. until now.”

— Natasha Carrizosa, author of heavy light

"As KB navigates burning issues of love, identity, race, and enforced gender, bearing witness to how intimacy can be a battleground, a declared truce, or an Eden, How to Identify Yourself with a Wound is never less than compelling and absorbing: 'Let me tell you the story of a tenderness the world refused to call / beautiful but it lives.' The powerful lines, the no-holds-barred voice, and risk-taking candor of these dynamic debut poems make the reader hungry for a whole volume." 

—Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas

“Our identities are more than formal structures that can be easily cut and pasted into headline categories like race or gender or sexuality. They are a collection of moments and events that drive us, head first, into the only names left for what we are. KB's How to Identify Yourself with a Wound is a fresh and energetic examination of the transformative process known as self-inquiry. Without hesitation, KB digs into what is often left unsaid about the internal querying process that leads one to the identity of nonbinary. Readers can expect to witness the origins of an audacious and empowered advocate whose lyric and inquisitiveness bodes well for the future of poetry."

—Faylita Hicks, author of HOODWITCH

“I found How to Identify Yourself with a Wound to be a gorgeous exercise in candor, a perfect display of authentic existence without surrendering to popular ideals of “authenticity.” I especially admire how even KB’s most morbid moments are infused with hope.

— Fox Auslander, Sundress Publications

“[this] is a collection brimming with color: the epithets put two different generations of queer women in conversation with one another, and through this invocation seeks to make sense of the alienation felt by Black queer and trans peoples.”

— Ashia S. Ajani, winnow magazine

“[How To Identify Yourself with a Wound] resounds with this impulse to reach beyond introspection in the search for identity; to collaborate; to share; and to study with a keen eye how others construct the personas they present to the world.”

— Dorothy Meiburg Weller, Sightlines Magazine

"this was, in all honesty, one of the best [poetry collections] I’ve read all year.”

— Rayne, Rayning Books

 “KB has approached the world and their life with curiosity and compassion. Or, at least, that’s my suspicion after reading this collection that moved me deeply.”

— Jen St. Jude, Chicago Review of Books

“KB’s poetry shimmers with a playfulness that veils the scars and struggles of a poet who refuses to be defined by the politics of propriety and respectability.  Each poem raises a fist against gender binary, emphasizes the viability of queerness, of blackness, and articulates KB’s own modes of identity and intimacy.”

— Uche Umezurike, Prism Magazine

“Their words give life to real love and, even, its illusion; illustrating how connection can be the single reprieve from the hellscapes we regularly inhabit.”

— Njera Keith, Co-Founder of 400+1

“How To Identify with a Wound is a musical collection if anything. The flow throughout this book has the ability to submerge you into the stories of love, desire, sex, race, family conflict and all round self-discovery. KB plays with the magic of sound throughout this collection, if you pay close attention.”

-Kirby Moses, Goodreads

“This beautiful collection of poetry is both deeply personal and yet somehow universal. As soon as you start reading you’re able to feel the pulse and rhythm of the words. Every detail, to the spacing and landscape of each poem, feels appropriate for what is written. KB takes you on their personal journey of love, loss, losing attachments, loneliness and simple joys. This collection is both important and profound, and it’s also a stunning read.”

-Codi Elizabeth, Goodreads