Deal Announcement: Deep Vellum To Publish Two Collections From Poet S. Yarberry
DALLAS, TX— Deep Vellum is pleased to announce the acquisition of two collections from A Boy in the City poet, S. Yarberry: Urgent, Stars and The Robert Poems.
Urgent, Stars is a sprawling, trans-poetic meditation on embodiment, gender, language, and intimacy. Through a mix of lyric fragments, personal examinations, historical interpolations, and surreal dreamscapes, S. Yarberry constructs a vulnerable and intellectual portrait of life as a trans speaker moving through the world. They navigate medical bureaucracy, social dysphoria, queer desire, and poetic inheritance, weaving these elements together through visceral language as well as literary and artistic references. Each poem is deeply rooted in materiality—needles, hormones, skin—while also reaching towards abstraction, myth, and celestial metaphors. The result is a collection that documents a transition not only of gender but of genre, selfhood, and cultural expectation.
“Through writing Urgent, Stars,” writes S., “I hope to illustrate connections between celestial bodies, textual bodies, and the formed bodies of the trans subject.”
The Robert Poems is a hybrid poetry collection that reimagines the life and metaphysical afterlife of Robert Blake, the obscure younger brother of William Blake. Based on scant historical records, Yarberry animates Robert as a ghostly, trans embodiment of longing, creation, and loss.
“Drawing from my scholarly background in Romanticism and Blakean studies as well as details from my own life as a trans person, I have attempted to create a world that flickers in and out of recognition—playing with historical boundaries and expectations around gender and transformation,” writes S. Yarberry on the collection.
Through a mix of dream sequences, erotic meditations, ekphrastic poems, and philosophical inquiries, Yarberry explores the unstable space between identity and erasure, memory and myth. The speaker often merges with Robert, imagining their transition not only through gender but through time, death, and art. This book serves as both a trans poetics and an act of historical excavation.
Urgent, Stars and The Robert Poems are slated to be released between the Fall/Winter 2026-27 season and Spring/Summer 2027. If you have not already, you can read S. Yarberry’s debut collection, A Boy in the City from Deep Vellum, Bookshop.org, or your local bookstore.
S. Yarberry (he/they) is a trans poet and scholar. Their poems have appeared in AGNI, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, among many others. His first book, A Boy in the City (Deep Vellum, 2022), was the winner of the Foreword INDIES Prize in Poetry. S. is currently a PhD Candidate in English at Northwestern University where he studies William Blake. Based in Chicago, S. runs the little magazine Tyger Quarterly and hosts the monthly PO Box Poetry Reading Series in Rogers Park.
Deep Vellum is a nonprofit publishing house and literary arts organization with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature. Founded in 2013 in Dallas, TX, Deep Vellum has expanded to encompass six distinct publishing imprints and is now the largest publisher of translated literature in the United States.