Bad Forecast

Steffan Triplett

Forthcoming Fall 2024

Bad Forecast is a hybrid memoir told in lyric and fractured prose, depicting grief not just in the aftermath of a tornado in southwest Missouri, but in all that is unearthed from the grounds of adolescence and young adulthood. The book explores the overlaps in the way we talk and think about weather, about queerness, about race: their disruptions, their pervasive pull, the isolation they can leave behind. What secrets are kept in the climate of Middle America? What spirals out after a storm? How do race and queerness, like the weather, inform a landscape? Bad Forecast considers how we interpret the forecasts that linger behind us and those still projected to come, brewing in the distance.

“In Bad Forecast, Steffan Triplett orchestrates the before, during, and after of a storm with skillful simultaneity —puzzling at strange light, imagining the sensation of being swallowed by the sky, and walking us through the wreckage all at once. What does it mean to make peace with a part of you that is veiled by the violence of disaster? A child sings Langston Hughes for a room full of children who don’t yet know how to parse color or queerness, and that small child’s beauty, that dance with dissonance, lends a soundtrack to ‘that day the sky changed.’ This book is a blue-gray reckoning, a look behind that glowing curtain, a dance with forces within and beyond the self.”

—Aisha Sabatini Sloan

“The expansiveness of Steffan Triplett’s cross-genre innovation in Bad Forecast is simply breathtaking. The poetics afoot in this moving and tender accomplishment by Triplett are of syntactic derangement that become increasingly unhinged, corrupting what holds the poem and what snatches breath. Something lurks in the wild blur of impending disaster, but also in the related chaos of becoming self. Bad Forecast is a sublime investigation into what could never be and a patient linguistic storm. I, for one, am completely seduced by its homage, its wonder, and its ‘buoy[ancy] amongst the waves.’ ”

—Dawn Lundy Martin

STEFFAN TRIPLETT is a Black, queer writer raised in Joplin, Missouri and the author of the nonfiction chapbook Constraints (New Michigan Press, 2024). His essays and nonfiction appear in The Iowa Review, Fence, Lit Hub, Vulture, and Electric Literature, and have most recently been anthologized in It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (Feminist Press, 2022). He is the Managing Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) and a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Triplett has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Outpost, Lambda Literary, and the National Book Critics Circle.