Beautiful Outlaw

Author: Jennifer Perrine

Publisher: Kelsey Street Press (2025)

In this fierce new collection of poems, Jennifer Perrine reckons with American gun culture’s pervasive presence in our daily lives, from the horrors of mass shootings and the aftermath of war to the specter of violence that haunts our neighborhoods, homes, and intimate relationships. Drawing on language from sources ranging from pop songs to Buddhist teachings, Beautiful Outlaw explores how violence is intertwined with anti-Asian racism, xenophobia, and heteropatriarchy. Alongside these poems of collective mourning and outrage, Perrine weaves in elegies for personal losses, including the end of a fraught relationship and the death of an estranged mother. Through wry humor and the play of formal constraints such as Golden Shovels, acrostics, and the Oulipo technique of the Beautiful Outlaw—in which each stanza of a poem excludes a single letter while including all other letters—this book offers an alchemical spell, transforming accounts of othering and absence into celebrations of community and resistance as salves for our grief.