Gender studies: transgender people Books

Book SynopsisOur life contains several lives as well as several deaths; we attempt to understand these little rebirths through poetry.  decompose explores pruning our past to make room for future growth; the expanse we are offered through the crush of heartbreak, discovering family beyond our original home, finding new meaning in our own name - S. Fey picks these timeless themes like roses from a flourishing garden to compose a thorny and succulent bouquet of living, loss, and rebirth throughout the rejuvenating pages of their debut poetry collection.

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Book Synopsis"These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut." So begins Renee Gladman's latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman's book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.

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Book SynopsisIn her latest book, New Life, Lambda Award–winning poet Ana Božičević writes, “For my birthday I want a cake/revealing the color of my soul.” Never saccharine, these poems are by turns cheeky and heartfelt, grounded and wistful, and above all—surprising. New Life is a book that is Dantesque in its ability to commune with the dead without becoming fixed in the past. Instead, the poems here have a distinct sense of nonlinear time, where each line feels like an ancient bone discovered, only to be reassembled into a chimera of another self. In this way, Božičević continually greets herself as a stranger, reminding us that in some respects every poem is a love poem.Table of ContentsTable of Contents BIRTHDAY NEW LIFE I FEEL LIKE WHO’S THAT I STOOD OUTSIDE... SOFT POEMWATERFALL CFNR EVERYDAY PEOPLE ISLAND5 THINGS AT 40 MY HEART IS AN OLD MAJORDOMOTHE ALCHEMIST’S DIARY THE LAST WAVE WEAK SIGNAL HIGH QUALITYTHE FUTURE ZAGREB ‘93 NULIFENAOMI POEMI PUT OPHANIM MY BODY IS HAUNTING MY SOUL HEARTLAND PERSON TREE FREEFALL THE WIND TREES SEELONG LINES REQUIEM FOR GEORGE MICHAEL’S HOLOGRAM ARS POETICA APOCALYPSE WOW SIGHTRASH MOONBYRONI WOULD LOVE TO EVIL TWIN THE GIFT SATURDAY & GOD IS DEPRESSED MOONWHATEVER MOONRING WIND 2 LAST LOVERS LEFT ALIVE UNTITLED 15-1 ON LIGHT NIKOLA TESLA FELL IN LOVE…ODE TO THE ☀ STRAND A ODE TO A ☁️ HELMET MUSIC SOMETIMES NAOMI POEM 2 SUPERSTAR TRIALOGUE GLITTER XXX ENDLESS HEART SAD WATERHOW THE WORLD DOESN’T ENDGLITTER 2 LAST STAR THE PHILOSOPHERS US BRUNO’S ELEGY HAPPY ENDING

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Book SynopsisNoelle Kocot’s ninth collection, Ascent of the Mothers, is a sagacious testament to the ways in which poetry can shape personhood. “I am nothing” they write, “Or else I have made myself / Too big for words.” The scope of this book is marked by Kocot’s psychic journey punctuated by a near-fatal car crash, which elicited a new understanding of their spirituality and gender nonconforming identity. Generous, self-aware, and resilient, Ascent of the Mothers is a treasure to behold and be shared.Trade Review These poems catalyze the reader to take pause and contemplate the sorrow and wonder of being human.—Publishers Weekly If this was Woodstock, Kocot was Hendrix. I have been to countless readings since but can think of only a few as unexpected, memorable, and moving.—Justin Taylor, Poetry Foundation Noelle Kocot’s poems are like sunlight coming through a window. —Stephanie Sy-Quia, The White Review There seem to be a few noteworthy poets in every generation, those who channel the zeitgeist from a clarifying distance, an artful remove. Noelle Kocot may well belong to this tradition... —Amy Newlove Schroeder, Boston Review Kocot’s gift as a poet is being able to explain such complexity with such uncompromised frankness. —David Peak, The Rumpus Kocot’s creativity engenders an excitement comparable to being twelve years old, exposed to good poetry or music or art for the first time, and knowing that, for better or worse, things have been bent. —Nick Sturm, Coldfront Magazine Table of ContentsContents Labyrinthitis18FlowersThe Physical WorldDivinationThe AnimalsGeorge BaileyI pray to be strongBefore a ShowerDrunkAt the HomeInstructions for the WindSong of Covid-19MigraineCrystal GayleA FishDelranPoem for My Goddaughter HannahAscetic, and the endlessGravely ListeningSalvationAscent of the MothersSay ItWhen will I stop punishingLetter to EliWhat is it that I amFar wind chimes a treeOut of HidingThe trees hummingThere is Darkness Over the LandDisasters

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Book SynopsisComprised of four heroic crowns of sonnets, Alicia Mountain’s Four in Hand is both formal and experimental, ranging from lyric romantic and familial narratives to blank verses of reconfigured found text pulled from financial newsletter emails. Language and white space equally captivate with their sparsity and abundance as Mountain pursues the implications of national political identity with intersectional awareness. These poems interrogate our collective complicity in late-stage capitalism, drone warfare, the election of Donald Trump, environmental degradation, mental health crises, and the dawn of Covid-19 through the lens of gay poetic lineage, regionalism, and familial kinships structures.As in all lived experiences, treacheries and triumphs fade in and out of focus and intimacy, heartbreak, travel, eroticism, joy, and quotidian happenings offer character and momentum across non-linear narrative arcs. Through enthralling images, gripping storytelling, and world-building, Four in Hand carves out necessary space for lesbian gaze, speakership, and personhood. From the back corner of a vast, sprawling, yet gorgeous landscape of thought, Mountain's poems beckon us inside.Trade Review“Four in Hand applies the gentle pressure of imagination to the possible world. Intimacy and expansiveness, grounded in episodic grace and sensual generosity, fuel Alicia Mountain’s work. Her words present us with beauty and allow us to revel in it, despite feeling ‘held tight like too much hope.’ We are shown emotional and environmental devastation, and given the music to reckon with the painful awareness that transforms best into action, repeated. Four in Hand is a blood rush, a mode of love in language crafted with care and immersion and insistence, harnessing the power of ‘a swarm/keeping quiet when I want to howl.’”—Khadijah Queen, author of Anodyne“In Alicia Mountain’s Four in Hand, the speaker tells us that the book is ‘a monument to touch,’ but more pointedly, it plays with an erotics of geography where thunder ‘spanks the hills,’ where one is encouraged to ‘drink the tidal push,’ where ‘tectonic shifts are underway.’ What is Mountain telling the reader about a storm that cannot be felt until the moment we feel ‘wrung out’ by its torrent? About a howl that cannot relieve what a beloved has buried within them? In these four sonnet crowns, each masterfully executed with their own distinct rhetorical and linguistic logics, Mountain enacts an alternative to catharsis; posits a kind of anti-catharsis. There is no rising action and then relief, instead Mountain interpolates what happens when the world does not change, but repeats, and insists on its tired holding patterns. Four in Hand doesn't simply tackle the failings of global health industries, the precarity of queer spaces, or how the language of risk and resilience end up recoding bodies through capital, it commands something else of ‘our sharp parts.’ It points us to an elsewhere of possibilities.” —Megan Fernandes, author of Good Boys

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Book SynopsisGrounded in protest and solidarity, Subhaga Crystal Bacon’s Isabella Gardner Award-winning Transitory is a collection of elegies memorializing 46 transgender and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the US and Puerto Rico in 2020. Epistolary in nature, these commemorative poems are “gleaned sketches” attempting to reconstruct lives and deaths from the typically scarce information made available on the internet. Interspersed with the elegies are personal explorations of gender identities and sexualities from a Queer elder who has lived through the post-Stonewall years of sexual liberation, the second wave of feminism, and the recent rapid increases in awareness about gender and sexualities met almost equally with anti-trans and anti-Queer violence. Seen through the lenses of whiteness and privilege from the last quarter of a lifetime, these poems navigate the desire to be at home in our bodies, to be loved and desired without danger, and most of all to live free, healthy, and welcome in the world we inhabit.Trade Review“Having roots in documentary poetics, and approached with deep lyric intensity, the poems in Transitory stand as elegies to the transgender people murdered in the U.S. in 2020, from Nina Pop, ‘Missouri drawl, the way you drank / from that tall Styrofoam cup and straw, your face lit by car lights,’ to Brian “Egypt” Powers of Akron, Ohio, ‘Paula Abdul back-up dancer was his childhood dream,’ and onward. The poems are written in a whirlwind of forms, containing facts from public records and snippets of dialogue from the murdered victims, their loved ones, and strangers, and the details— ‘fingerless black gloves,’ ‘Her love for My Little Pony,’ that compose a life. The forms provide elegance. Dignity. The details, affinity. I tried to read Transitory as I usually approach books of poetry, but this collection asked me to supplement my reading with research. I sought news stories, faces. I wanted to know. To have known so deeply that I could feel each loss with profundity. I found myself in keeping with Subhaga Crystal Bacon, who writes, ‘I need to name this, the brutality of tallying the dead…not just counting, but incanting.’” — Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets “Subhaga Crystal Bacon’s brilliant new book is poetry beyond the unrelenting pressure of news cycles, giving names to harrowing statistics of murdered trans people, returning life to the air --- for a moment --- in the breath of a poem. When politicians sanction violence by criminalizing trans and queer bodies and branding us subhuman, Bacon puts the love and the real live beating hearts back into their bodies, turning every No into an emphatic Yes! I love this book!” — CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death “Transitory's chronology of hate crimes starts on January 1, 2020, documenting one year of the unending river of names--"Samuel, Bianca, Dominique, Fifty Bandz"--of people we've lost to anti-trans violence. Here beloved bodies are "pulled from the Schuylkill River," hurt "in the parking lot of the Days Inn," on "a bit of grass off the University of Ohio campus," or "on her own block, close to home." These poems witness these horrors, and honor the dead in the complexity and real joy of their lives, creating a timeline, shared eulogy, and act of resistance. Combining traditional forms and erasures with the pleasures and close calls of her own past, Bacon highlights not just these acts of violence but also everyday moments in the lives of those lost: "studying nursing," "driving a taxi," "showing off in short shorts and shearling boots," or looking forward to cleaning the house: "a Saturday morning deep clean that’s a whole vibe." Slowing down long enough to look at this one year's worth of loss allows us to recognize the enormity of our collective grief.” — Jill McDonough, author of Here All Night

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Book SynopsisConsumed with the accumulation of lost time and unfulfilled longing, Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen is an intricate exploration of things left unfinished or unsatisfied. Divided into four sections and shaped by female-identified embodiment, Desire Museum touches on lost love and friendship, climate crisis, lesbian relationships, and the imprisonment of children at the U.S.-Mexico border. These poems trace the pleasures and pitfalls of sex, the anxieties of motherhood, and the ramifications of interpersonal, sociopolitical, and environmental trauma in women’s lives. In these pages, Deulen holds up a candle to desire itself, questioning what it means to recognize and embrace one's desires, or what it might mean to let them go.In conversation with Hopkins, Keats, Crane, and Lorca, Deulen seamlessly weaves memories into dreamscapes and blurs the human and natural worlds. With love, wonder, grief, and awe, Desire Museum shows us that to live alongside desire is to refuse to be contained: “I refuse meaning [ ] the first sunrise reiterates the last.”Trade Review“Desire Museum is all that is delicious about poetry—small windows through which the fresh breath of self-knowledge blows through, the mouthfeel of deft language, the eros of travel. But this collection is also astonishing in how it builds mythologies around dissolution, ardor, and allusion. I have loved wandering in the halls of this book’s illuminating galleries and Deulen’s deft curation.” — Carmen Giménez, author of Be Recorder“Drawing on sources from classical mythology to particle physics, these poems render lost loves and lost letters, abandoned places and selves. Beasts abound—a fox, a tiger, an octopus, a cow. There are sleepless nights and regretful kisses, the voices of Keats and Hopkins, Lorca, and Crane. All along, Deulen confronts ardor’s ghosts, interrogating the myriad ways hunger and heartbreak get transmuted into art and memory. Sometimes funny, always smart, endlessly inventive, Desire Museum is a restless and intoxicating book!”— Bruce Snider, author of Fruit“Danielle Cadena Deulen’s luminous collection Desire Museum assembles and remixes the past, constructing not pristine displays under glass to be admired at a distance, but dynamic exhibits that shimmer beneath our hands. How many selves can one life contain? What remains after great loss? At once dreamlike and insistently clear, these poems call across time and space, inviting former lovers, canonical poets, and the ghosts of former selves to commingle in an ever-shifting present. This is a book to read and remember.”— Chelsea Rathburn, Georgia Poet Laureate, author of Still Life with Mother and KnifePraise for Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us (2015) Winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize “Danielle Deulen borrows the title of Montaigne’s essay for her extraordinary poetry book Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us. Both philosophical and anecdotal, Deulen’s poems are slippery pronouncements of our ever-allusive present which is co-opted by nostalgia for our past “ancestor utterly naked, rock damp beneath her bare feet” and anxiety for our future in which we will find we “were not, after all, human.” Infused with psychology and cinema, Deulen’s work reads like “poetry vérité.” Fiercely intelligent and unpretentiously profound, Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us is a thoroughly compelling book.” —Denise Duhamel, Contest Judge “The touchstones of Danielle Cadena Deulen’s superb new collection are nothing less than the great philosophers of the Western canon, ranging from the pre-Socratics to Hélène Cixous. Yet her pensées, troubled meditations and edgy but graceful lyrics are too searching and honest to look to these sources for consolation. Instead, these are poems which remind us of what William Matthews saw as one of the core functions of poetry—its recognition of 'the need of experience to resist resolution into knowledge.' Deulen’s poems are as impassioned as they are intelligent, as elegant as they are unflinching. Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us is a book of sustained and haunting power.” — David Wojahn​“The poems of Danielle Deulen’s Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us are as superbly ambitious as they are fiercely intimate – and those things require each other here. And so they are lyric in the rightest sense, shaped by an intuitive, associative logic – as in the title poem, where secrets of ancient mathematicians, mothers drinking gin from Solo cups, recollections of a coming-of-age friendship, and the knotweed and bronze hills of eastern Oregon all gather into a chorus about order and irrationality and hurt. Whether looking through Lacan at a child’s split reflection in a carousel mirror, or careening through a litany of daily human catastrophes we bring about because (perhaps a paradox of privilege) “we are bored,” these poems never just intellectually astound – they also burn.” — Rebecca Lindenberg Praise for The Riots (University of Georgia Press, 2011) Winner of the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction Winner of the GLCA New Writers Award "There are moments of transcendent prose in this manuscript that elevate it far beyond what we might expect of it at first blush. It manages to become more profound, and more beautiful, the more desperate and tragic its trajectory. Finally, it is a triumph of wisdom and great art." —Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Into the Beautiful North "Fierce, tender, explosively honest, Danielle Cadena Deulen’s radiant debut sings like a prose poem and lingers like a fever dream. In the liminal world of The Riots, the face of a dead girl under the bridge worries a hole in your mind though you never see her, mercy shatters trust, and a boy’s stuttering confession of love exposes his sister’s crimes against him. Through the grace and devastation of shared memory, Deulen dares to know the dispossessed, to re-invent her father’s life and try to save him as a child. She remembers what cannot be, transfiguring herself through the passion of desire." —Melanie Rae Thon, author of In This Light "There is general agreement that adverse childhood experiences leave permanent scars, but with a person as gifted as Danielle Cadena Deulen, the result is transformative for writer and reader alike...Deulen poignantly and poetically relates the effects such experiences had on her, her family, and those around her. It is a sad, but beautiful, and, ultimately uplifting compilation." —ForeWord Reviews "The Riots is rooted firmly in that world of hurt, mired in the struggle to understand and accept the past, and to do so—crucially—without being defeated by the onslaught of negative memory."—Diagram

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Book SynopsisA nuanced view into the complexities of aging as a transgender person.

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Book SynopsisAn oral history and critical genealogy of accountability, the complex abolitionist concept that pushes us to ask: just what do we mean by community?A concept just short of a program, accountability has been taken up as a core principle within leftist organizing and activity over the past quarter century. While it invokes a particular vocabulary and set of procedures, it has also come to describe a more expansive, if often vague, approach to addressing harm within movement work. The term's sudden, widespread adoption as abolitionist concepts began to circulate broadly in recent years cast light on certain shifts in its meaning, renewing the urgency of understanding its relation to militant leftist history and practice. After Accountability gathers interviews conducted by members of the Pinko collective with nine transformative justice practitioners, socialist labor organizers, incarcerated abolitionists, and activists on the left, and also includes framing essays by the Pinko collective in which its members situate and reflect on those illuminating conversations. An investigation into the theoretical foundations and current practice of accountability, this volume explores the term's potential and limits, discovering in it traces of the past half-century's struggles over the absence of community and the form revolutionary activity should take. Contributors: Kim Diehl, Michelle Foy, Peter Hardie, Emi Kane and Hyejin Shim, Esteban Kelly, Pilar Maschi, and Stevie Wilson, and Pinko collective members Lou Cornum, Max Fox, M.E. O'Brien, and Addison Vawters.

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