“A title as understated as Dispatch deserves poems that challenge and change our idea of what poetry is and of what it can do. Cameron Awkward-Rich has written those poems—brilliantly original, what I imagine listeners must hear when they first encounter Billie Holiday: the voice understanding its subject, the subject having in it some horror, the voice seeming to lag behind as it finds unexpected and particularized language from the ‘blackened heart.’ This book’s urgency comes from its understanding that the world it cherishes is a world deteriorating. Yet it is a book of love poems no matter what!”

“Weighed down by the “brutal choreography” of violence against black, queer, and trans bodies, [Awkward-Rich] reestablishes buoyancy through will and formidable artistry...”

“The poems in Awkward-Rich’s second collection speak with poised urgency out of profound, enduring fear imposed by impossibly huge forces… and steady themselves, when steadiness seems possible, on the fact of an undiminishable self beyond language.”

“Cameron Awkward-Rich’s debut is a stunning announcement of a voice that demands we move closer as much as it wishes we’d go away. The ornate emotional terrain of these poems is charted with the poet’s sometimes spare, sometimes wild, always skilled lyric. We are invited into a story Awkward-Rich suggests we “know the words” to, but damn if it doesn’t sound better when this poet tells us. As much about stillness as it is about transition, Sympathetic Little Monster is at once analytical, magical, confessional, dismissive, but ultimately, and simply, a collection breaking new ground in Trans, Queer, Black, and American Letters. For many, Awkward-Rich’s poems will burst open the mind, the heart, and even some doors, but when you get in there, just leave him alone.”