A CONGREGATION OF ALLIGATORS by Grayson Thompson

SEPT 2, 2025

A two-lane Florida roadway opened in 1968. Now a superhighway, Alligator Alley, quickly became a dangerous place for tired people driving to (or from) the outline of home. A reckoning of which came first, the person or the dinosaur, straddling becoming. Grayson arrived to this book at the collision, and meant every word. Found each answer at the corner of rebellion and tenderness. Was afraid of the dark the entire time and still is. A self-described sand-bodied Florida boy, A Congregation of Alligators explores what happens when the stories we’ve been told about ourselves, as old as the beginning and taught to us so true that they feel prehistoric, were put to rest

“When the world, your family, the news on the evening television tries to erase and distort you, we need anthems of becoming that allow us to dream and imagine a world we get to claim and love ourselves. To exist without being at war with your body is the light these poems are reaching for, reminding us that “for the people whose families can’t hold them/you were born to swim”. Thompson’s poems bring us through fear and violence to the beautiful possibilities of queer love, the audacity of survival, and how forgiving others with generosity can be a part of how we heal and free ourselves. The beautiful lyricism of these poems, the adamant entanglement with love and authenticity is exactly what we need.”

- Noah Arhm Choi, author of Cut To Bloom

“Grayson Thompson writes with a quiet dignity that belies his formal mastery and his clever command of language. A Congregation of Alligators is many things—a reminiscence, an affirmation, a brave and painstaking assessment of personal traumas—but its power comes from resisting the reinvention, the clean break. Instead, Thompson shows that one’s current life is not a transformation, but a culmination of who one has always been, with moments of desperation and adversity built upon, not shed. Panoramic and somber, the collection details a whole person, one you can sit in silence with for a long time.”

- J. Howard Roiser, Board Member, National Book Critics Circle