Reviewed by Bess Cooley | Mar 28, 2026
Dopamine Books, February 2026
Paperback, 120 pages, $16.95
I had the pleasure of hearing Kelsey L. Smoot read his work in a bookstore in the Atlanta area last spring. The room was small, quiet but crowded—in that way poetry readings are meant to be. Smoot had his audience, and me, transfixed. It was one of the more vibrant poetry readings I’ve experienced, with Smoot performing the work in a way that made the poetry jump off the page. With voice and inflection, and with physical movement, Smoot embodied his work fully.
What a gift, to be able to witness this reading. But so, too, was it a gift to get to read Smoot’s new collection, Soulmate as a Verb, which similarly leaps off the page, and speaks, and moves, and shouts at you, and whispers at you, and cries, and laughs, and gets angry. Smoot’s lines are often sharp and end-stopped in a way that remind me of his reading. But then, the moments of enjambment stand out that much more when they lilt along a stanza. “This world is too massive / for this myopic urge, I write / you love letters and leave me a clue- / less mess to clean up,” Smoot sings.
Soulmate as a Verb begins with a poem about language itself, and which from the opening line declares, “all Black people are poets.” The poem sees a binary in language, which is transgressed in colloquial speech (“so many things / that sounded good / were not actually good”). A binary that is immediately paired with gender: “only a girl can be fast / in a bad way / and a boy fast / in the good one.” Smoot opens the collection by showing us how willing we are, in language at least, to traverse binaries, to transform one thing into another, as poets do. “I would say my gender is Black,” he writes, “And that masculinity is just / How I relate to other beings / A state / An expression / A genre of human experience.”
And in many ways this book is also a study of masculinity itself, as in the poem “What Men Are Made Of”, in which the speaker “learn[s] quickly / that I should aspire to be a real man /…so I look around / and take notes on the behavior of men— / jot down the essentials… / of what makes a man / a man.” But what Smoot finds is more performance, and harm: a cat-call, which is when an old man “teaches me / to speak louder, / just enough to spark a small flicker of fear // “You look nice today.” As a trans man, Smoot’s relationship with masculinity itself is understandably fraught in several of these poems, is questioned, but is also “the answer to questions no one ever planned on asking,” he writes in “Glory Days.” “Couldn’t you walk lighter than a feather,” is one question, “instead of this hulking beast, a blight, refusing / to be the beautiful through-thread of this story?” But this collection, as well as the speaker himself, is an answer to these questions, an answer that celebrates and finds beautiful that body—in all the genders and iterations it has occupied.
A shape poem, “Chest Binder Bliss // Top Surgery Blues,” is a contrapuntal poem (two columns can be read three different ways: column one, column two, and across both columns) in the image of a chest binder. Here, two straps to hold the binder to a body, one piece to flatten the breasts. The left-hand strap describes wearing the chest binder itself, and the right strap shows a surgery that creates “this body—forever mine / this new, foreign thing.” Reading the two “straps” or columns across, both experiences are acknowledged as one. And, finally, in the second half of the poem, shaped as the binding itself which flattens the chest, is a beautiful almost-elegy for the speaker’s own chest binder, which he no longer needs post-surgery and is donating to “the anonymous recipient of my well-worn scrap of plastic,” writing “this will crush you / bit by bit, a tiny suffocation every day—but it will feel like freedom.”
While bodies and embodiment appear in varying ways throughout Soulmate as a Verb, the entire collection also spans a body. A torso, really, with the sections labelled “Chest,” “Ribs,” “Lungs,” and “Heart.” This calls to the way we present and perform those bodies, how they present to others, how others use them, and, ultimately, their beauty, even when Smoot describes that beauty as “ugly and unabashed.” Soulmate as a Verb is a praise song for the bodies, especially Black trans bodies, bodies that their inhabitants love and have made their own, bodies that are in danger in every way that a body can be in danger.
The collection’s final poem, “Bricks,” is a litany of what Smoot “hope[s] [his] books become”: “I hope all my books are banned books… / I hope my books become / so obscure / that someone’s biggest flex / is telling you they’ve read me… / I hope white people hate my shit… / I hope they outlaw my books / And then drag queens read them to toddlers / on the front steps of the capitol.” These hopes are not only hopes, but ways to read Soulmate as a Verb: as an ask, a plea, a demand.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Kelsey L. Smoot (he/they/Kelz) is a gender theorist, an elective Southerner, a writer, and a poet. His autoethnographic style has become the lens through which he understands and reflects on his experience navigating the US sociopolitical landscape. Currently, Kelz serves as an Assistant Managing Editor at Sundress Publications. Proudly, he is also the author of two chapbooks: we was bois together with CLASH! (An Imprint of Mouthfeel Press) and Muse, with Another New Calligraphy. Thrillingly, Kelz’s debut full-length collection of poems, SOULMATE AS A VERB is out now with DOPAMINE/Semiotext(e).
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Bess Cooley is the author of the poetry collection Florence (Sundress Publications 2024). She is a winner of the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, and her work has also appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, American Literary Review, The Journal, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She is co-founding editor of Peatsmoke Journal.