By S. Yarberry
A speculative poetic history reimagining Robert Blake, the brother of the poet William Blake, as a trans person in the eighteenth century.
Publication Date: November 17th, 2026
Paperback: 9781646054503
eBook: 9781646054510
Description
A speculative poetic history reimagining Robert Blake, the brother of the celebrated poet William Blake, as a trans man in the eighteenth century.
Blending deeply researched historical details with the author’s personal experiences, The Robert Poems playfully and critically imagines a trans literary archive during a period in which transness, as we know it today, is not always readily visible. Robert Blake was a ghostly figure that often visited his brother, William, after Robert’s untimely death at the age of twenty-five—the same age S. Yarberry was when they began their medical transition. This happenstance of transitions, medical and metaphysical, drove Yarberry through a series of poetic explorations culminating in a collection with one question beating at its heart: what if trans history could be built on abundance, rather than scarcity?
For fans of Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox and Ruth Padel’s Darwin, The Robert Poems provides a lush landscape for Robert to thrive within, offering a new wellspring for trans pasts and a springboard from which to imagine inventive, expansive trans futures.
Biographical Information
S. Yarberry (he/they) is a trans poet and scholar. Their poems have appeared in AGNI, Guernica, Gulf Coast, and Indiana Review, among many others. His first book, A Boy in the City, (Deep Vellum, 2022), was the winner of the Foreword INDIES Prize in Poetry. S. is currently a PhD Candidate in English at Northwestern University where he studies William Blake. Based in Chicago, S. runs the literary magazine Tyger Quarterly and hosts the monthly PO Box Poetry reading series.
Reviews
“What an incredible collection of poems! Once I started, I could not stop reading. S. Yarberry has created a space for a lens on themselves and the world between two Blakes. 'Someone is opening up their arms to engulf what cannot be forgiven. Sorrow happens in the daylight too.' The Robert Poems is great news from a brilliant poet queering the language anew.” —CA Conrad, author of First Light
“In The Robert Poems, the poet’s interior life elides with that of Robert Blake, imagined in Yarberry’s book as a transman. The shifting ‘I’ between Robert and S. permits an expanded consciousness as the poet traces out a way to live, a kind of transsexual self-fashioning, modeled on the act of divine creation and art-making à la William Blake’s ecstatic images. ‘I lull myself into being,’ S./Robert writes, and the poems are marvelous and mystical, tender ruminations on how desire and art can precipitate a person into being their boundless self.” —Julian Talamantez Brolaski, author of Advice for Lovers
“In the exquisite lines of S. Yarberry’s The Robert Poems, the incomplete archive of history becomes a rich transformational space in which to fracture and forge a narrative of self. I went down hard / inside myself—the poet writes—wanting to die / and wanting to live / and always wanting both / at the same time. Daring, intimate, and boldly speculative, The Robert Poems examines what it means to lose and gain the self, to become / this brokenness, and be.” —Natasha Trethewey, United States Poet Laureate (2012-2014)
“S. Yarberry's The Robert Poems writes back what's lost to the feverish Blakean archive. Conjuring an unquenchable constellation to pin the shadow of being to, these poems bear loss in order to bear life, where the self approaches the self through trans formalism that rides the undertows of apocalyptic and apocryphal desire. Slicing across "edge of edges" and the "shell of hearts" of desire's "fretted prophecies," The Robert Poems offers us salacious fabulation, unafraid to want something into existence: the self. These poems do that—transcend the death at the heart of life to make something new. Like Milton entering Blake's foot in searing inspiration, these poems make me arch for more and more and more.” —Rosie Stockton, author of Permanent Volta