* Winner of the 2020 CSU Poetry Center Lighthouse Poetry Series Competition, selected by Randall Mann *

Praise for NO DOUBT I WILL RETURN A DIFFERENT MAN:

Wray’s poems are wry luxury items of intelligence, sheathed in the latent double of speech, where a word like family might mean, in the queer parlance, refuge, but also, refutation. This is an interrogative, primal, mythic collection, a poetry of privacy and disclosure, of contradiction, a disabused landscape under “razor-wire stars.” RANDALL MANN

No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man explores how complicated relationships between fathers and sons cast long shadows over the future self. In Wray’s poems, eros shades at times uncomfortably into social violence and self-abnegation, making this book both love song and elegy to masculinity and its performances, to queerness, and to self-invention. Wray’s sharp-eared lyrics move between the darkly campy and the sublime, proving that paternal elegies themselves are “queer things” whose shifting modes allow him to investigate the limits of fatherhood itself.  PAISLEY REKDAL

Situated in the long posterity of one of the most infamously shattered queer lives, this tense excavation of Alan Turing, this careful and sumptuous overlay of men’s secrecies and assignations seventy years apart, is fascinating. No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man delves for origins, stirs encryption with erotics, and makes “caught looking” palpable in its thrill and thrall. BRIAN BLANCHFIELD

TOBIAS WRAY’s writing has appeared in journals including Blackbird, Bellingham Review, Meridian, Third Coast, and The Georgia Review as well as The Queer Nature Anthology and The Queer Movement Anthology of Literatures. He served as a poetry editor for Cream City Review and holds an MFA in Poetry and Translation from the University of Arkansas.

MORE INFO:

The Georgia Review

Author website

Blackbird

The Arkansas International

The Colorado Review

Poetry Foundation