The light must spill to shine. The thing you must be is yourself.

Intimate and uncompromising, Rev. Julián Jamaica Soto’s debut collection Spilling the Light, is a luminous offering to their communities and a defiant declaration of their worth in a world hostile to their queer, disabled, and brown being.

“America, is this freedom?” they ask. “I cannot prove to you that / I am a person,” writing boldly of identity, community, liberation, and erasure through a prism of tender moments and powerful reckonings. These are poems of broken hallelujahs and codes/witching, of hunger and fire, of hope and resilience. They are complex, tender, and empowering. They embolden us to become our truest selves, willing us to survive.