Description
Book SynopsisTrans grew out of Hilda Raz's experience with her son's journey to a transgender identity. The collection of poems moves between past and present, allowing Raz to reflect on her own childhood and on her experience with breast cancer to find ways to connect with her son, Aaron.
Trade Review“It was Hilda Raz’s remarkable book
Trans that shifted ways of reading poetry for me. If you want to read a poetry of honesty and often pain ‘in working through things’—then Raz’s poetry is exemplary in this.”—John Kinsella, author of
Jam Tree Gully and
Firebreaks“Whether she writes of Aaron or Sarah, funerals or fields, Raz’s tone remains sincere and open: ‘Nothing to explain, no shield,’ she writes, ‘of paper thin skin between history and the untender world.’”—
Publishers Weekly“What subject could be harder for a mother to document than her daughter’s sex-change operation? Some of the strongest poems in this collection by poet and anthologizer Raz focus on that transformation.”—
Library JournalTable of ContentsPart 1
Avoidance
What Do You Want?
Drought: Teaching, Benedict, Nebraska
Tough
Names My Mother Knew
Houses
Said to Sarah, Ten
Fast Car on Nebraska I-80: Visiting Teacher
Afternoon, with Cold
Sick
Back
Friday
"The world is not something to look at; it is something to be in."
Part 2
Secrets
Heart Transplant
Footnotes
Doing the Puzzle / Angry Voices
Prelude
Part Coquette, Part Monster
Trans
Trans formation / Feathers / Train Travel
Stone
Before John and Maria's Wedding
Part 3
Historical Documents
Volunteers
Some Questions about the Storm
Lost Jewelry
Mother-in-Law
Women & Men
Some Questions for the Evening Class
Insomnia III
She
Letter from a Place I've Never Been
Not Now
Summer
Anna Maria Is Coming, or Maybe Thomas Barton, or Max!
Part 4
Hello
The Address on the Map
Wonder Woman's Rules of the Road
Aaron at Work / Rain
Sarah Returned to Me, Wearing the Poet's Gloves
Company / 3 A.M.
First, Thus
The Storehouse
Early Morning, Left-Handed
Visitation: Pink Foam Letter
The Funeral of X, Who Was Y's Mother
Acknowledgments and Notes
