A two-lane Florida roadway opened in 1968. Now a superhighway, Alligator Alley, quickly became a dangerous place for tired people driving to (or from) the outline of home. A reckoning of which came first, the person or the dinosaur, straddling becoming. Grayson arrived to this book at the collision, and meant every word. Found each answer at the corner of rebellion and tenderness. Was afraid of the dark the entire time and still is. A self-described sand-bodied Florida boy, this collection explores what happens when the stories we’ve been told about ourselves, as old as the beginning and taught to us so true that they feel prehistoric, were put to rest.

This collection swims in the ferocity, briefness, and eviscerating breath it takes to survive. It speaks to a conversation with every reader that navigates the awkwardness of growing into a person – falling out of love with your friend, how to become a man after being raised in all the synonyms for girl, challenges with food, love poems that don’t reference flowers, the ocean, running away, the loss of a friend to suicide, homecoming, childhood, fear, grief, family and the ways they undo us, intimacy, and other places our bodies go to try to make sense of hope, pain, and risk. Grayson spent a mouthful, laughing in fluent magic, taking these gator stories to be witnessed: in a bar, in a bedroom, at your mom’s house, in his family, in a lover, in every awful thing he ever said about himself, in therapy, in HRT, in gender, in a name, to you. He believes we are all grasping grass, on a planet moving faster than a whisper, fighting every wild thing thrown at our reflections to not be alone. Thank you for being here, he’s glad you made it.