Don’t Let It Kill You
Theo LeGro

Winner of the 2025 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry

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. 

“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 Aylan 

“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.”
—Kimberly Grey

Theo LeGro is a queer Vietnamese-American poet and Kundiman fellow whose work has earned nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. Their work appears or will appear in Blood Orange Review, Brooklyn Poets, diode, Honey Literary, Plume, The Offing, Raleigh Review, and others. They live in Brooklyn.

Trade Paperback / $19.00 (Can. $25.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-639-7 / 64 pages / Poetry