Kantor has written a soul-bearing book of poems. Truth and honest are in every page. Their grief, struggles with depression and identity are written in a way that doesn't hold back. The poems are beautifully crafted both in language and shape. Lines such as these will stay with you long after you've finished reading:

"remember how busy you were
trying to figure out how they got in

that you forgot
about the person living there"

This is a book that needs to exist. Nonbinary voices are difficult to find and so very necessary. May this book find its way to the hands of nonbinary youth who can know their struggles are not singular that others know their experience and that they can push forward through the struggles.

"We are from different stories,
could only ever whisper in the wings,
& yet the men who found us, love us
share a sound that would suggest
The possibility
of something else"
Please Come Off-Book is a powerful punch-to-the-gut poetry collection that simultaneously felt like a comforting hand on the shoulder letting me know that maybe my feelings are, in fact, valid, as a fellow nonbinary person.
This is a stunning collection, probably one of my favorite modern poetry collections that I've read over the last couple of years. I'm always eager for more work by queer, nonbinary artists and this felt like exactly what I was looking to read right now.

When I saw this book - a poetry collection by a non-binary author, about theatre! - I immediately knew I wanted to read it; I am extremely pleased to say that it lived up to my hopes.

"Please Come Off Book" is a powerful, poignant collection of modern poetry built around major themes of gender, queerness, theatre, and family. These are often the explicit subjects of poems, but just as often are framing devices or casual asides; making their presence known, but not overpowering the more immediate or specific topics of the poems.

Kantor is unafraid to play with form and style, and the results are very effective; the words of one poem shape a sailboat and waves, and another plays with line spacing in an almost disorienting experience. Throughout, the language is gorgeous, the images are vivid, and the emotions are unfiltered and powerful. I found the majority of the poems to be beautifully crafted and evocative; there were a few which did not, in my opinion, match the emotional resonance and loveliness in language of the rest of the poems, but on the whole I was extremely impressed. Writing good poetry is hard, and Kantor does it well.

Some personal favorites (I've abbreviated the longer names for ease of readability in review format!) : "My Mother, Pregnant With Her Third Child ..."; "Character Study: Enkidu"; "Stage Makeup Syllabus"; "The Man Playing My Father"; "Dress Rehearsal: Final Dress".

I very much hope we'll see more poetry from Kantor in the future! Thanks to Netgalley and Button Poetry, for providing me with an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I fell in love with Kevin's poetry several years ago after seeing a video of their poem People You May Know. It was one of those pieces that just rested in my chest for a while after. I felt the same when Write About Now posted a video of I Am Sure (then written as I'm Sure in the video's caption). It had me in tears and I still think about that piece every now and then. So I was so glad both pieces found a place within this collection. Kevin's work is equal parts powerful, beautiful, eye opening, and gut punching with some playfulness throughout. This collection is truly something special.

Thank you to Kevin Kantor, Button Poetry, and NetGalley for the advanced copy.

{Digital copy provided by NetGalley}

This is a vivid, powerful, and very queer collection of poetry and I loved every second of it. The language used is stunning, the social critique biting, and the theater woven into everything absolutely lovely. I bookmarked more than a dozen poems that I especially loved, and look forward to buying a physical copy to shove into all my friends and family’s faces!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC of this book.

"so glory to the queers who live to see the credits role
glory to the blockbusters that are not built upon a curb stomp"

This collection is original, personal, and gut-wrenching. In particular, the poems surrounding queer representation and gender identity are hard-hitting and raw, and Kevin Kantor is a wonderfully fresh new voice whose writing I hope to see more of in the future.

Exquisitely written poems about an experience I've never had, that none the less were hard hitting and beautiful to read. Though one poem left me less than impressed - the swear word on repeat for the whole of it - I thoroughly enjoyed Please Come Off-Book and devoured it in one sitting, making a mental note of all my favourite lines to share with friends once I'm able to buy them a copy.

'Please Come Off-Book' is the sort of collection that will see you veering from heart-aching honesty to laugh-out-loud hilarity. Kantor seamlessly weaves the theatrical and the personal in a dazzling conversation around identity, family, and the difficulty in being yourself in a world determined to impose it's own restrictive boundaries. This is not just a collection of flawless poetry, but an unflinching conversation around the repercussions that can exist when living your truth. And yet, though the poems explore themes such as suicidal ideation, grief, rejection, and prejudice, there is always a sense of hope for a better, kinder, and fairer world.

Really enjoyed this collection of poems, there is a mix of styles, one is even shaped like a boat which is very clever and effective. Others worked less well. The poet has really experimented and been open and non binary in the way they are choosing to explore their keys themes; a love of theatre and their own gender identity. There is also a moving poem about being a survivor with amazingly evocative last lines and another one about Pride in the fullest sense of its meaning. A wonderful, moving, fun, poignant collection.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for an ARC in exchange for a review.

Thank you so much to Button Poetry for providing me with an Arc of this poetry collection in exchange for my honest review.

I absolutely adored these poems. This is the first time I head anything from this poet before but I definitely love their work! A few of my favourite poems are:

People You May Know (very hard-hitting and powerful)
Secondary Character (really loved it!)
I Am Scrolling Through Instagram and Crying (The title alone was so relatable and I really loved this poem!)
I Am Sure (Very powerful)
The Director Gives Me Notes After Our First Run-Through (To say this poem stuck with me so much, I had to take a few moments to recollect myself afterwards)
Rewrites (Shakespeare plays but make it queer, do I need to say anymore? As an Englis major and queer person I adored this)

I will definitely be on the lookout for more of this poet's work in the future!

Clever words from Kevin Kantor. Though I am new to the poet’s work, there was much here to enjoy and I look forward to reading more of this creator’s work soon.

I received a free ARC for an honest review from Netgalley. I had trouble deciding what to rate this, but decided on 3 1/2 stars.
It is difficult to rate poetry. I normally rate based on enjoyment but am trying to rate more on the quality of books. I enjoyed this book at times and others it was a little hard to get through.
I can't relate to most of the content in this book. I picked this up because I am always trying to better educate myself on things like this. I could feel the emotions and pain from the writer.
This was well written and different, I just had a hard time getting through some poems. I know this will be a favorite for lots of people.

The only appropriate way to describe "Please Come Off-Book" is eye-opening. You won't look at life the same way after experiencing these words, after rotating the book to follow the narrative, after wiping your tears away only for more to arise.

While the queer representation and title critique of American culture is certainly more honest than most readers can handle, the poetry provides the same tear-jerking effect, though not in the way you might expect. These are not your classic poems filled to the brim with literary devices and meta themes. In my interpretation, they are straightforward and honest, which in a twisted way is just as though-provoking as poetry that is indecipherable. For example, the explicit analysis of suicide, self harm, and trauma seems like equivocation but the realization that it is simply a monologue provides a sense of omnipotence; depression overcomes all, even a complex writing style. As a reader who has struggled with most (not all) of the principal topics of discussion, I would have appreciated a trigger warning in the beginning of the book. Kevin Kantor wrote the truth, and in this book like in life, the truth is not sugarcoated.

Another element of "Please Come Off-Book" I am impressed with is the structure. Before I realized the book is organized like a play, I recognized the similarities in the structural role that trauma plays in your life (thanks to therapy). The parts of the book are as follows, and their corresponding representation of trauma:

1. Inciting Incident (the traumatic event, experience, or accident).
2. Rising Action (the PTSD, anxiety, or long-lasting emotions surfacing in your daily life and the descent into despair).
3. Climax (hitting rock bottom, for example attempting suicide or isolating yourself to avoid facing your emotions).
4. Denouement (reaching out for help, receiving guidance, bridging the Climax and Transformation).
5. Transformation (reaching happiness or your goal by overcoming the anxiety or emotions caused by the trauma).

If there's anything to say about "Please Come Off-Book," it's that it is the simplest but most complex, darkest yet most optimistic, and most derogatory yet most promising book you'll read. If only there were more than 88 pages!

Overall Rating: PG-13
Language: PG-13
Adult Content: PG-13
Violence: R

Recommended For and Similar Reads: "Please Come Off-Book" is a mind-boggling, heartwarming, inspirational read for mature teenagers who are looking for in insight on the treatment of queer people and the effects of said treatment. Similar reads are "Impulse" by Ellen Hopkins, "Calling in Black" by Nicholle Ramsey, and "Butcher" by Natasha T Miller.

As someone that is completely new to reading poetry - I have to say that this book of poetry was incredibly easy to follow and enjoy if you are new! I would definitely recommend to anyone as a way to ease themselves in to this way of writing; that can often seem quite daunting if you haven't really dipped your toe in.

These poems are very 'of the now' - dissecting societal issues mainly when it comes to queerness, 'otherness' `and living in a society that doesn't account for your identity.

My favourite poems -
'I Am Sure'
'A Poem in Which the Academy is Forced to Create New Categories'

Would recommend (as a poetry novice)

I am going to be honest, I have no idea if poetry is for me. This was my first poetry collection and as a fellow non-binary theatre enthusiast (techie in high school!) I was very drawn to the description. I loved a lot of the poems in here and it did get very dark. Certain poems really resonated with me and others I read and appreciated for what they were. One thing I really enjoyed was how the whole collection was formatted through the stages of a play, but not a usual act 1, act 2 etc. It brought a lot of separation in tone of the poems and what part of Kantor’s life they were a product of. I’d definitely recommend this to anyone looking for LGBTQ+ poetry, a collection about self-discovery, and for anyone looking to broaden their scope. I unfortunately don’t have a full trigger list but I will leave the ones I recall down below!

TW’s: Sexual assult, rape, self-harm, death of a family member, homophobia, the f slur, misgendering, suicide, abusive parents

Wow, this little book of poems surely packs a punch. I've only recently got into reading poetry for pleasure, having found it hard to access at school, but I raced through this in one sitting. Maybe I just needed to find the right poetry for me, who knew?

Anyway, Please Come Off-Book is a series of poems combining experiences from the world of theatre with musings on the nature of gender, sexual assault, parental non-acceptance and more. It is not an easy read, but it is a remarkable one. The poem that affected me most was I Am Sure, in which Kantor explores experience (their own?) of sexual assault and the way victims are so often not believed.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you NetGalley!

The cover of this book is simple but eye-catching.
This book was raw, powerful, and contained so much emotion.
I found myself wanting to read more and more.


I'd definitely purchase a copy and check out other books by the author.

'I am sure that <i>man</i> and <i>woman</i> is not all a body can be.'

Wow, what is not to like about such a bawdy, intimate, tender and life-affirming collection of verse, especially when it contains such gems as ‘There are not Enough Songs about Eating Ass’. This is my introduction to Kevin Kantor (they/them), a spoken word poet, teaching artist and queer activist, among others. This is not my first introduction to Button Poetry though, which is quickly making a name for itself as the ‘go to’ publisher for speculative modern poetry.

Despite the fact that poetry is a compact, bite-size literary form that makes it ideal for our crazy pandemic world – which is showing no signs of going back to normal anytime soon; I am looking at you, second, third and even fourth wave – people remain defensive about <i>not</i> reading poetry. It is ‘too difficult’, is the usual caveat. ‘I don’t understand it’, is another favourite.

Do you understand every last word of any novel you have read? My advice is to choose a poet and collection that appeals to you, and then to just give yourself over to the experience. In the hands of a genuinely gifted artist like Kantor, it is a hugely liberating experience.

It seems kind of ‘in your face’ to structure a poetry collection about the perils and triumphs of being non-binary as a performative work. There are fragments of plays, random dialogue, citations and even an extended play on movie awards and titles. It does not sound cohesive, but it works. Kantor’s collection is organic and accretes slowly in the reader’s consciousness.

Of course, this is also a nod towards Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, who argues that gender is a social construct. Kantor engages with social theory via his lived experience, and never resorts to polemic. This makes a poem like ‘I Am Sure’, about male rape, incredibly powerful and devastating to read.

Despite the seriousness of the themes that Kantor tackles, this is also a delightfully playful, sassy and often very sexy collection: From wonderful word games such as a poem called ‘Subtext’, which is simply a text block of ‘fuck off’ with a <i>don’t go</i> slap bang in the middle, to ‘Once Upon a Time in Iowa’

So once upon a time in Iowa, a
once upon a time boy lived locked away in a high
tower – or a state school’s freshman residence hall –
occupied by trolls – or the junior varsity lacrosse team –

to the lyrical ‘Character Study: Cesario Helps Ganymede Redress in the Dark’

We are from different stories,
could only ever whisper in the wings,

& yet the men who found us, love us
share a sound that would suggest

The possibility
of something else

I really enjoyed this poetry collection. The queer reinterpretations of some of the most famous theatre works were probably my favorite part of the collection because queer and trans people deserve to be represented, in all types of stories, and deserve to see those characters get happy endings. This collection deals with a lot of heavy themes and topics, but it also celebrates the joy of being seen and accepted for yourself by those that have chosen to belong in your life.

I read this in one sitting while draped in the comfort of my comforter; the winter sir spilling into my bedroom through a crack in my window. Vanessa Carlton’s Rabbits in the Run flows out of my tv speakers while I engulf the words on the pages of this book. Did I understand all of it? No. Did I feel through all of it? Absolutely. And that’s what matters.