Life’s inexplicable cruelties thrum through Bad Forecast, Steffan Triplett’s moving cross-genre work of beauty amidst the tragedy of living. The work’s throughline is the aftermath of a town struck by a tornado, of the deep grief of survival and loss. Along with all the wreckage and houses whirled away by wind during a catastrophic storm, one of Triplett’s friends is tugged into the sky, pulled out of the arms of his father and the tether of a Hummer seatbelt when the sunroof breaks during the storm, killed on his high school graduation day. Triplett works to hold and handle this loss throughout the work, threading in themes of biblical destruction, tormented dreams, and the destruction of innocence that comes from knowing the future is never promised.

In “Adjacencies,” the opening poem of the hybrid collection, Triplett reckons with horrors too terrible to name. Absences loom large in the poem, as they do in the speaker’s life, as they do – forever – in the lives of all those who are still alive to mourn those who are gone. “i want to be grounded,” Triplett writes. “i need words to keep us / indolent and unready / to lift off from the earth.”

In many ways, Bad Forecast is a tale of coming-of-age, of coming-out, and of coming-to-terms with the losses that make up a life, just as much as the joys do. “We smiled at the promise of predictable life,” Triplett writes of setting classroom butterflies free in the short essay “Butterfly People,” just before a classmate stomps on the insects scrambling for flight, the boy’s vicious brutality cutting the newly freed lives short.

It is a book that looks clearly into the near constant grief that runs through American life today, one made uniquely worse by the terrors of racism and bigotry, at horrors that are out of our hands and those within our power to stop. For Triplett, a queer Black writer originally from Missouri, bone-deep awareness of these atrocities is omnipresent. “the / zimmermans always find a way,” Triplett writes in “Slumber Party.” “when little i wondered if god / ever got tired – / he must be asleep.”

Bad Forecast also grapples deeply with religion, of a god who would let these senseless deaths happen, with trying to make these incomprehensible losses bearable, with how to live in a world full of cruelties that can be commonplace and deliberate, or devastating and random. How do any of us survive? “maybe grief is like / tornado season / perennial / an always swirling-up / when the conditions are / just right,” Triplett offers.

And often, all we have to lean upon is one another, even imperfectly. In “Middle Seat,” a poem recounting a flight, already a terrifying experience for one who “just can’t trust the clouds won’t whirl you back down,” the speaker’s seatmate is a white blonde woman.

“I think she,

too, has been reading –

going out of her way to

talk to the Black person

next to her, on a plane,

trying to make up for

anything someone else

has done wrong today,

or yesterday – wanting

to help someone sur-

vive it all.”

Bad Forecast, from Essay Press, is Triplett’s second work, following Constraints, a chapbook from New Michigan Press. Like Bad Forecast, Constraints is a lovely, lyrical work of hybridity, making use of formal constraints and deliberate absences in the text to convey deep grief and wrestling with the guilt that can often exist alongside survival. “I am still getting used to feeling / happy,” Triplett writes in the opening poem, “Apartmentalizing.”

Yet through all of the unbearable losses and mourning, Triplett faces life with a sense of hope and a deep, joyful appreciation for beauty. In Bad Forecast’s final lines, our narrator is in the sea, surrounded by friends, “queers of all color in the ocean.” Only senses are evoked, a full-bodied experiencing of all this beautiful, terrible world has to offer, for as long as it has to offer it. “The water is warm,” Triplett writes. “I gaze into the moon. I am buoyant amongst the waves.”