Praise For the Boy Who Likes Pink Winner of the 2026 Keystone Chapbook Prize from Seven Kitchens Press.

“Blues, booze, queer love, getting out, moving on: Like a good country song Jeff captures a world flinching at violence and longing at the beginning of the 21st Century. From the rhythmic pantoum “Drama Queen” where off your meds, / you claw, you bleed / black mascara tears to the striking imagery in “Fresco” capturing an angel still / on her knees, / a thousand years or more. For the Boy Who Likes Pink exposes the chaos & clarity within us all.” -- Kelli Russell Agodon

“In For the Boy Who Likes Pink, Jeff Walt traces the afterlife of innocence. The chapbook begins with a child learning to put down what he loves and follows the reverberations of that moment across a lifetime—through bodies, through desire, through the quiet architectures of loneliness. These poems reveal how the self fractures early and spends years attempting repair. Even at their most erotic or dark, they remain rooted in something more urgent than desire: a need to be held without shame, to be known without correction. “Let him have one small softness…” What Jeff offers is not a return to innocence but a record of its persistence—the way it survives in the body, resurfaces in hunger, asks again and again to be saved in whatever language adulthood allows. Here, even the smallest gestures carry the weight of survival..” -- Jose Enrique Medina