AVAILABLE JUNE 1ST 2025

from Foglifter Press

SAND BODIED FLORIDA BOY

It was either a phone call or a message, or a fight so bad your tongue set trees on fire. It was around a table, at a bar, in an art gallery, a support group, over a late night with your favorite person, the last night you saw them, on a bike ride, in a breakup, at a hospital, when you were in love. It happened when you least expected it, maybe you weren’t ready to hear it, maybe you fought it with the worst parts of yourself. Whenever it came or whatever it was, what a thing to know it arrived.

Grayson’s Sand Bodied Florida Boy is a love song to the first moment you felt believed in, when hope wasn’t a question, but an answer in every breath you chose to take. It is a collection of poems about the flood breaking through the sandbags, and the person waving a flag on the other side, a lighthouse beacon of becoming, screaming your name. Hollering you home. That person is you. It’s me. It’s any awful thing we never meant to say, or wanted to take back, or meant. It is the hot air of an “i love you” ballooning the sky pink. There is a job board, somewhere, bigger than the beginning, with a list of vacancies for living. Each day, in big font, our lives come out messy, the complicated track record of people committed to painting the story of how they got here. He is so glad you came. The job description, there’s only one– is don’t hold it all in.

This collection explores the reimagination of his boyhood, something he did not socially or biologically receive as a Black trans person, and how he grew to make sense of who he would become. It speaks to being an immigrant possibility dream for his Jamaican mother, who has never run from a hurricane but wonders every year about the sandbags, and how he began creating grace out of his name. Accepting that, sometimes, grace rhymes with grief and grief is a doorway word to the flood.

Praise for Sand Bodied -

“These poems feel celebratory in their memory and their making: a visceral discovery of how one poet makes it through. Childhood, displacement, returning to the body, Black, Queer, survival: here is a wonderful, surprising new voice.” - Lee Harrick, California Poet Laureate

“In Sand Bodied Florida Boy, a collection full of love and determination, Grayson writes, “to show up here, every day/an honest star.” These poems articulate how much it matters to show up, to wake up, to claim your true self, despite pain and grief and loss. Can poetry save us? Maybe not, but it can help us “to realize I was never a metaphor/for wrong.”

— Katherine Riegel, author of Love Songs from the End of the World and Co-Founder of Sweet Lit

“Sand-Bodied Florida Boy is a lyrical journey through the labyrinth of memory and identity. This skillfully crafted chapbook explores the complex tapestry of childhood, queerness, and the enduring power of vulnerability. With "Remember all the names that brought you," Thompson invites readers to delve into a world where unwavering love and actualization intertwine. This transformative book is "what love sounds like when it comes home."

— Lexi Pelle, author of Let Go With The Lights On

“The title of Grayson Thompson’s Sand Bodied Florida Boy makes me imagine a young Black boy who buries himself in the sand of the beach, and when he leaves, the small imprint of his body is left behind. In this collection, Thompson similarly forces us to confront the body-shaped void that boyhood can dig into the ground. These poems masterfully teeter on the sharp edge on which childhood innocence is lost, show us the moments in which the vibrant, child-like world is revealed to be an illusion as thin as paper. Thompson writes, “in childhood when we had the ability to see / the world / naked and asking / all the tough questions…” What comes after that childhood curiosity, that free nakedness? Grief. Understanding. Running from a hungry tide.” 

—Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, Winner of the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award

“The fact that this extraordinary book is Grayson Thompson’s debut is not the most remarkable thing about Sand Bodied Florida Boy. What we have here is an electrifying collection of poems fearless in their psychological profundity, poems that celebrate life while critiquing its inequities. And, isn’t it the task of the poet to articulate not only what we are but what we are capable of becoming? Here, the pain is very real. But so is the resilience. He writes, “I know what loving myself is now / it’s building a poem / heart break by heart break.” Thompson’s moment is now. And we’re beyond fortunate to witness it.”

“Sand whose nature provides a way for impressions to be made, feels like an apt metaphor for what grief and trauma do to a body. Thompson’s collection asks me to sift through time whose capacity has the power to heal and also reminds us of all that we’ve endured. Like sand, these poems seek to name many harms endured and from that place rebuild anew as Thompson writes, “but I know what loving myself is now/ it’s building a poem/ heart break by heart break.” Thompson’s poems teach me that no body travels a journey unscathed and as we learn to love our grit, which these poems have, we allow ourselves and others grace and the power of the written word. “

— Dare Williams

“…With vivid imagery and fearless vulnerability, Thompson captures the transition from survival to selfhood, turning trauma into a powerful narrative of resilience and becoming. A testament to bravery and belonging, Sand Bodied Florida Boy is a hymn for those navigating the messy, miraculous act of existing fully.”

—Steven Reigns, author of Inheritance and A Quilt for David