Don't Let It Kill You

Poems

2 June 2026

Territory Rights — Worldwide.

Description

Winner of the 2024 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, Theo LeGro's unflinching debut explores chronic illness, inherited grief, and the brutal, tender intimacy between the body and self.

From hospital rooms to dive bars, Don't Let It Kill You by Theo LeGro confronts the complexities of loss and mortality with ferocity and wit. These poems test the tension between survival and surrender, healing and destruction, where the body is a site of betrayal and forgiveness, pain and longing, where the frailties of the flesh lead to a haunting tenderness toward the self. With language that refuses to flinch or flatter, these poems tells the truth about sickness: How boring it is. How brutal. How sacred. The poems do not seek to inspire. They do not resolve. They testify. Aching and defiant, Don't Let It Kill You refuses to yield or comply, weaving between intergenerational trauma and incurable illness with biting lyricism to explore where desire and fear collide as proof of life and life is its own feral, sacred kind of rebellion.

Reviews

"Theo LeGro's poetry does what poetry is supposed to: it tells the truth about the ugly side of survival without ever forsaking the tender beauty of life. Relentless and irreverent, the poems in Don't Let it Kill You transform dive bars and operating rooms, haunted houses and strangers' beds, into thresholds of revelation. A stunning debut." — Hala Alyan, author of The Moon that Turns You Back and I'll Tell You When I'm Home

"In Don't Let It Kill You, the body is both battlefield and witness, speaking through mastectomy scars, lipstick worn to surgery, and the remnants of legacy. These poems move with unflinching clarity through corridors of illness and desire, attending with exquisite care to the strange, quiet moments that live beside survival. They wrangle grief like a live thing, hurling us back into life again and again—refusing false hope while holding a fierce, unsentimental tenderness for the self in all its iterations: whole, broken, and remade." — Kimberly Grey, author of A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing

Paperback

9780892556397

178 x 229 mm • 64 pages

£12.99

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