Wesley McNair said that poets, more than others, are troubled by the transience of life, and they write poems to preserve the experience—to say, “I was here, and my being here meant something.” Lucky Boy is a collection informed by experience—childhood trauma, limitations of place and circumstance, the messy transition from boyhood to manhood. The poems are my attempt to preserve and elevate these experiences, to acknowledge their complicatedness, and to celebrate the role they played in making a poet