Kelsey Street Press, 2025

Winner of the Kelsey Street Press QTBIPOC Book Prize

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.

“For heart, for smarts, for a scalpel-precise vision of our America at this moment—I want Jennifer Perrine’s poems to guide me through the misogyny, xenophobia, yearning, racism, connection, and gun-fascination of our time. It’s not just their bravery, but it’s also their formal mastery, particularly in the Beautiful Outlaw, a form that guides by absence. I am so grateful to have met Jennifer’s voice, and I’m eager to see where it takes me. “

— Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica and editor of Cascadia Field Guide

“Jennifer Perrine’s Beautiful Outlaw witnesses the devastating effects of violence and requires us to consider our own complicity. Through its fierce energy and movement, we are urged to gather in community towards a transformed world. This is the book I need to see in the world right now, as friend, companion and guide.”

— Ching-In Chen, author of recombinant and 2023 QTBIPOC Book Prize Judge

Buy the book from Kelsey Street Press or your local bookseller, or order a signed copy here.