Distributed by YesYes Books and Ingram
Cover Art: Salomé Grasland
Design: Karen Sofia Colen & Hobbes Ginsberg
$20 | 106 pages | ISBN: 978-1-946303-13-4
Speculative Poetry | Perfect Bound | May 19, 2026
Sara Youngblood Gregory’s stunning debut, DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, is a testament to resilience. These poems—structured with astonishing skill and arranged with profound wisdom—delve into the sexual and medical, grief and family, and challenge the lingering glooms and impulses of afflictions. To read this work is to witness a writer tackling difficult subjects with breathtaking bravery and poetic governance.
—Vi Khi Nao, author of My Ardent Love for the Pencil
In DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, Sara Youngblood Gregory deftly grapples with queer and feminist histories refracting them through personal experience and poetic experiments. It is a marvel to behold.
—Julie R. Enszer, author of Pinko Commie Dyke
DEAD BOYS IN SPACE is a vibrantly imagined world of a very real grief. In this triumph of a debut, Sara Youngblood Gregory sings us a refraining eulogy—a eulogy of both individual and communal loss. In each poem, I feel awash in the holiness of our queer ancestral kin. In each poem, I am lost in Youngblood Gregory’s lyricism which asks, again and again, where all of our dead have gone. I am found when Youngblood Gregory writes: what it means to be human changes. What an enduring gift, that it changes, and that we have poets like Youngblood Gregory to help us along the way.
—Kayleb Rae Candrilli, author of Winter of Worship
DEAD BOYS IN SPACE
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from Blood Sister / Only Child
I keep your history
the one you never asked for
and which outlines my grief but never yours
You don’t belong in scripture
or legends or congratulatory myth
A story isn’t enough and neither is sorry
But when I don’t know what to say
I say sorry
I say this time I will tell it right
About the book
The question is not why my brother had to die. The question is how do I save him?
Exploring the AIDS crisis, space colonization, and earth-bound lesbianism, DEAD BOYS IN SPACE uses poetry, speculative fiction, sci-fi, and crip queer politics to ask: what if a generation of gay men didn’t die of AIDS? What if their exile was actually escape? And what happened to the family they left behind?
Told from the perspective of a sister mourning her brother—one she never knew—Sara Youngblood Greogory’s startling debut, DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, is a testament to anger and love, sex and sickness, grief and family.
About the author
Sara Youngblood Gregory is an award-winning lesbian journalist, editor, and author. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the New Republic, New York Magazine, Vice, Teen Vogue, Cosmopolitan, The Guardian, them.us, and many others. Sara serves on the board of the lesbian literary and arts journal Sinister Wisdom, where she is currently editing the forthcoming Butch-Femme Renaissance issue. She was the News and Reporting Spring 2023 Fellow at TransLash Media, covering anti-trans legislation and community organizing in her home state of Florida. In 2023, Sara was the recipient of the Curve and NLGJA Award for Emerging Journalists. The same year, her speculative poetry collection DEAD BOYS IN SPACE won the 2023 Pamet River Prize from YesYes Books and will be published in May 2026.
