Who I Love Marks Time in My Bones by Yasmine Bolden

Limited edition print copy from the 2026 Garden Party Chapbook Contest!
Shipping in Fall 2026!
cover art: As Auntie Says… by Alexis Rogers

Yasmine Bolden (they/them) is a descendant of Black/Nahiłií women who heard the earth speaking to them through their gardens and lovingly spoke back. They’ve been named a 2026 West Trade Review Prize for Poetry finalist, and an inaugural I, Too, Am the Dream Grand Prize Winner in Poetry by Angie Thomas. Their poems and research have been planted in or performed for the National Library of Medicine, Baltimore Beat, ONLY POEMS’  Best New Poems, Alocasia: 99 Queer Writers on Plants & Nature, Rootwork Journal, and other literary garden plots. They were a Writers in Baltimore Schools Teaching Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, where they co-founded the school’s only poetry club and performed in the inaugural Rituals of Remembrance honoring the memory and legacies of those enslaved on the lands that now make up the university’s undergraduate campus.

Praise for Who I Love Marks Time in My Bones:

I've been calling Yasmine Bolden my lil sis, ever since I learned that at the time of Beyonce's drop of Single Ladies, they were in kindergarten and I was in the 10th grade--both of us, dancing. WHO I LOVE MARKS TIME IN MY BONES is a beautiful gift, highlighting the best from our newest generation of poets where secrets, salts, queerness, seas and questionings aren't reprimanded by the firm hand of our elders. Elders, who sought to keep their children safe by stripping them of all things strange, othered or too transformative to be given a digestible title. Instead, secrets, salts, queerness, seas and questionings are shared within this collection as cubes of sugar. These poems are our teas, coffees, waters, and tequilas. WHO I LOVE MARKS TIME IN MY BONES, our table. Bolden is our magnificent hostess, daring us to speak and share of our lives like the darlings we deserve to be. It is such a wonder to welcome this debut chapbook. This taste of talents to make way for plenty more tea parties, sugar cubes and speakeasies to come. This big sis? Is exceptionally proud, and clapping the loudest in the crowd.

-Exodus Oktavia Brownlow, author of WHEN IT GETS COLD IN THE SOUTH, debuting with Screen Door Press x The University of Kentucky January 2027. 

Who I Love Marks Time in My Bones is for those who know and are also constantly relearning how to carry the joygrief of worldendings and rebeginnings. This book embodies the pearlesque, not as dainty pearlescence, but as rogue, trickster, and subversive sinew of the oceans. The pearls in these poems invite you to string them worldbuildingly. This collection asks: How much longer can this world live on, feeding us amidst the lovelessness of domination and exploitation? It offers, to those willing to love and grieve and dream deeper, for the sake of us all, a field for brown soil bodies to root and grow, to weave and web, worlds upon worlds of liberatedness and grandmothers’ healing. It knows the queerness required to love the world is boundless. The poems in this book dig into the most beautifulest abundance of language amalgamation and the synthesis of remembrance and imagination, jolting the reader into an emotive state of being in direct opposition to the forces that would rather us numb and unfeeling. Thank goodness for unflinching poetics such as the ones in this collection, that confront worldendings heart-on, rather than shy away from them. 

-Ayling Zulema Dominguez, award-winning poet

Yasmine Bolden's "Who I Love Marks Time in My Bones" is, above all, a song for the affectionately monstrous cast of its pages. A call-and-response love letter to queerness in its most expansive sense, this chapbook is deft and precise in its tenderness. Bolden writes to the "soul-bludgeoning silence of an x on a census", to "the eldest daughters of eldest daughters' eldest daughters", to the daughters of Lot's wife turned pillar. This chapbook is an invitation to participate in a glorious, joyful song deeply rooted in queer, Black, anti-colonial legacies. It's really a gift to the reader to be invited into Bolden's conversation with such a firm and welcoming hand.

-Mya Matteo Alexice, GPC 2026 Judge