D I Y Body by Toni Garcia-Butler PB

In D I Y BODY, Toni Garcia-Butler crafts a vibrant, defi ant exploration of identity, inheritance, and self-making at the intersections of Black, Filipino, southern, and Trans/queer experience. Through poems that move between memory, performance, and everyday ritual, Garcia-Butler builds a body not given, but claimed piece by piece, voice by voice. These poems are alive with sound and movement: karaoke bars become sites of transformation, kitchens hold the ghosts of lineage and love, and mosh pits offer fleeting freedom from misrecognition. This chapbook is a proclamation of naming, desire, family, and belonging, an insistence on the right to define the self beyond expectation or constraint.