Released February 28th, 2021 // 84 pages // 978-1-915079-06-0
 
[WHITE] is a book born from obsession. This debut collection of poetry from Trevor Ketner follows two paths of obsession, laying them over one another to tease out a critique of whiteness in the arts that reflects on how we think of whiteness in America. Throughout, Ketner curates a landscape that is part [auto] biography and part political synthesis.
 
Ketner's work takes inspiration from seeing a retrospective of Rauschenberg's work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) seven times and from teaching themselves to read tarot in two weeks. [WHITE] is a kind of combine or collage of two projects that speak to and against each other and, in their juxtaposition, become an entirely different third thing. As we follow the life of Rauschenberg, so too do we follow the journey of the fool through the major arcana of the tarot moving forward into understanding. Here is an examination of queer bodies, Rauschenberg traveling toward, through, and away from infamous lovers in pursuit of art and selfhood, eventually finding himself in "the January water / of a lake nearby / called Eden." Meanwhile, Ketner exposes the insidiousness of whiteness and its inescapable role in American history and art.
 
PRAISE for [WHITE]:
 
'White is not blank nor is it pure,' Trevor Ketner writes in [WHITE], an obsessive, amphetaminate, formally adventurous, book-length exploration of the palimpsestic nature of art, gender, literature, and selfhood. Ketner's meditations on Rauschenberg's multi-faceted work becomes, as well, an examination of racial identity, queerness, and erasure.
   — Forrest Gander, The Trace
 
An impressive debut, [WHITE] is a gestural, lyric analogue of a Rauschenberg combine: 'Art as context exercise;' 'Artist as:/fussiest framer.' From out of a collage of autobiographical detail and opulently performative phrasing, a trenchant essay emerges about white queer art-making, appropriation, erasure, and violence. Ketner might embrace visual art's mid-century white gay avant-garde, but their lusty retrospective glance doesn't idealize its network of lovers, collaborators, and competitors. Instead, [WHITE] explores the pleasures and limits of identification, tradition, and desire.
   — Brian Teare, Doomstead Days
 
Encountering this immaculate and innovative collection of poems felt as if I were experiencing a deftly curated museum exhibit, a performance art piece, and that delicious liminal tension between prose and poems. Trevor Ketner investigates the ideology of ekphrasis by probing the work of Robert Rauschenberg to uncover what has been hidden and erased by calling out the beauty and failure of art and its interpretations. Narrative and lyric energy pulsate through these stunning poems as theater and tarot reveling in queer desire and deleted intertextuality.
   — Tiana Clark, I Can't Talk about the Trees without the Blood
 
Trevor Ketner is the author of [WHITE] (University of Georgia Press, 2021) selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series by Forrest Gander. Their chapbooks include Negative of a Photo of Fire (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019), White Combine: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (The Atlas Review, 2019), and Major Arcana: Minneapolis, winner of the Burnside Review Chapbook Contest judged by Diane Seuss. They have been published in The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Brooklyn Rail, New England Review, Ninth Letter, West Branch, Pleiades, Diagram, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Their essays and reviews can be found in The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, and Lambda Literary. A 2020 Lambda Literary Fellow, they have been a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow, Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow for The Poetry Project (selected by Wayne Koestenbaum), and a Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Fellow. They hold an MFA from the University of Minnesota and live in Manhattan with their husband.