Beforelight explores queer childhood as a site of rupture and queer coming-of-age as a process of both becoming and unbecoming. The speaker in these poems confronts the impacts of ruptured relationships and trauma on his nascent identity. Grounded, lyrical, and deeply psychological, these poems grapple with the fragility of our most formative relationships—familial, communal and ancestral—as the speaker searches for a communion with himself, and how not to “make a life out of pain.”