Description
Book SynopsisA reprint of trans poet, activist, and teacher TC Tolbert’s beloved debut collection of poetry.
In Gephyromania (literally, an addiction to or an obsession with bridges), Tolbert’s choice isn’t between female and male, lover and self, or loss and relief, but rather to live in the places where those binaries meet. Is a bridge simply an attempt to connect one body back to itself? Sensing the parallels between a lover who leaves and his own female body as it chooses to recede, the poems in Gephyromania explore the spaces between, among, across, and even within bodies.
Trade Review"Tolbert’s debut collection, named after an obsession with bridges, bends both lyric and theory-driven poetics to their breaking point as it explores the limits of and territories between desire, will, loss and gain, and the experience of moving from female to male embodiment."—Publishers Weekly
“Gephyromania teaches us that to unmake a body, language, and thereby a world is as meaningful (perhaps more so) than building—and that unmaking is, oxymoronically, a form of creation. This collection presses hard and urgently against the throat of mainstream western notions of what it means to inhabit a gendered body. A truly necessary book!”—Dawn Lundy Martin
“Tolbert's linguistic imagination, his sense of the ways words can join and shatter, is omnivorous, and the boundless possibility of his language counterpoints the painfully bounded possibilities of bodies and hearts from which these poems emerge. The love here doesn't alter but the speaker does, and the music of these poems is the music of body and soul soaring together as they tear apart.”—Joy Ladin
“TC IS SISTER BROTHER ALL OF OUR WEIRDEST WEIRDNESS WRAPPED IN ONE CIGAR. This book is stunning. Every letter feels cared for. Poetry to undiminish the real lives of a ruined empire is in your hands right now. Do you own this book yet? Do you plan on lending it out? Do you want to see it again? DON’T BE A FOOL!! Let them buy or steal it for themselves.”—CAConrad
