KT Herr
2025 Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize Finalist
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On salvation
If you want to learn to save the world, you have to save it all: not just the five parrots at the zoo, separated for conspiring to swear at tourists, but the tourists, too—and the lady with the Judy Blue jeans, and the one with the Cakes nipple covers—grippy, not sticky!—the one whose disembodied hands mash raw burger into the bottom of a pan, and the one who stands off to the side, ooing and ahhing. You have to save whatever engineer invented that one AI voice you always associate with your middle school bully. You know the one. And you have to save your middle school bully, too, wherever she is, and you have to save the voice, even if you don’t know what that means. You have to save the zoo administrator who quarantined the parrots; and you have to save his sister, who voted for Jill Stein. You have to save Jill Stein. You have to save everyone who worked for her campaign—for any campaign—and those filthy freaks behind the scenes, greasing the wheels. You have to save the wheels, even when they churn out horror instead of humor; prisons instead of parrots; bombs instead of blue jeans. I don’t make the rules, I just play by them. But you know, if we do decide to save it all, we should sit down and have a long talk about the bombs.
KT Herr is a writer, collagist, and stepparent from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Their poems appear or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Massachusetts Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere, and have been selected as winners or finalists for Best of the Net, the Monarch Queer Literary Awards, The Adroit Journal’s Djanikian Scholars program, and the American Literary Review Prize in Poetry, among others. KT’s work has been supported by residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, by Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and by grants and fellowships from Great Lakes Experimental Arts and Inprint Houston. A board member with Four Way Books and poetry editor for Gulf Coast Journal, KT holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD in critical poetics from the University of Houston.
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