BAD FORECAST

My full-length debut, Bad Forecast, is out now!
You can ORDER now via the publisher, Essay Press, or through distributor Asterism Books for larger orders.

Bad Forecast was the Editor’s Choice in the 2021 Essay Press Book Contest.
cover artwork by Julie Mehretu

Reviewed in Foglifter Journal: “This is a brilliant collection on several levels…as unpredictable and exciting as real life and the human brain.”

Reviewed in TYRONE edition: “‘Bad Forecast‘ is a testament to human fracture and the untenable nature of neat narratives to dignify the human condition.”

Reviewed in Barely South Review: “[Bad Forecast] is a book that looks clearly into the near constant grief that runs through American life today… trying to make these incomprehensible losses bearable, [grappling] with how to live in a world full of cruelties that can be commonplace and deliberate, or devastating and random.”

Additional Press:
A Conversation with Steffan Triplett, Voice of the Arts
Steffan Triplett on The Last Word podcast

Advanced Praise:

“In Bad Forecast, Steffan Triplett orchestrates the before, during, and after of a storm with skillful simultaneity —puzzling at strange light, imagining the sensation of being swallowed by the sky, and walking us through the wreckage all at once. What does it mean to make peace with a part of you that is veiled by the violence of disaster? A child sings Langston Hughes for a room full of children who don’t yet know how to parse color or queerness, and that small child’s beauty, that dance with dissonance, lends a soundtrack to ‘that day the sky changed.’ This book is a blue-gray reckoning, a look behind that glowing curtain, a dance with forces within and beyond the self.”
—Aisha Sabatini Sloan

“The expansiveness of Steffan Triplett’s cross-genre innovation in Bad Forecast is simply breathtaking. The poetics afoot in this moving and tender accomplishment by Triplett are of syntactic derangement that become increasingly unhinged, corrupting what holds the poem and what snatches breath. Something lurks in the wild blur of impending disaster, but also in the related chaos of becoming self. Bad Forecast is a sublime investigation into what could never be and a patient linguistic storm. I, for one, am completely seduced by its homage, its wonder, and its ‘buoy[ancy] amongst the waves.’ ”
—Dawn Lundy Martin

“For Steffan Triplett, steeped in an African American experience, located in the bible-belt and tornado country, discovering a queer self becomes a complex awakening. There is fear, doubt and loathing. In a miracle of poetics, shaped by an adventurous use of the page as stage, Steffan Triplett creates spaces for love to break out. Readers will remember Bad Forecast long after reading it. They’ll feel invited to return to its compelling scenes of distress and puzzlement, loss and shock.”
—Fred D’Aguiar

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CONSTRAINTS

(ESSAY CHAPBOOK)

Constraints was a finalist for the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press Chapbook Contest, a finalist for the the Newfound Prose Prize, and runner-up for the Gold Line Press Nonfiction Chapbook Contest.

Reviewed in Aster(ix) Journal: “Triplett succeeds at quiet inspiration…”

Reviewed in Trust Your Wings Books: “There are lines & moments in each essay I will return to time and time again.”

Reviewed in Barely South Review: “Constraints is a lovely, lyrical work of hybridity, making use of formal constraints and deliberate absences in the text to convey deep grief and wrestling with the guilt that can often exist alongside survival.”

You can preview the piece “Quest” and order a copy here.

ANTHOLOGIES

My work is featured in the following anthologies: