Hold Me Gorilla Monsoon

Opo Books and Objects, 2017 (Available Here) 

Colette Arrand gives self-effacing evidence that disindentification is the way love grapples. The grappling itself is constitutive, it brings together bodies that constantly have to mark their difference with and in spite of touch. Rather than embrace or refuse, in any absolute terms, Arrand lets us know that in this proximity holds the potential for both a rejection of queerness and the queerest of queer slippages. These poems are hot as fuck because they almost come together before they rend apart.

— Raquel Salas-Rivera, author of Caneca de anhelos turbios and oropel/tinsel

Her poems portray and confront the ways masculinity is performed and learned through professional wrestling. They triangulate hypermasculinity, queerness, and homophobia in wrestling, conveying the painful experience of encountering these things as Arrand’s speaker comes to terms with her own trans identity. These poems are ambitious and dizzyingly good.

— W. Todd Kaneko, Waxwing Magazine

To Denounce the Evils of Truth

Long Day Press, 2016 (Out of Print)

Instead of a simple yet inherently false truth, Arrand opts for complex truths. “Observe me,” she writes, “I want to be remote, but not unreachable.” Arrand is successful in putting the person on the page, and she does so with language that is beautiful, in essays that lyrical, in moments that are clear and affecting. 

— Eric Nguyen