Full Description
An excavatory collection of poems tracing the connections between Jewish transfemininity, queer desire, and cultural histories.
Selected by Sean Hill for the National Poetry Series, this collection is a scrupulous chronicle of individual and cultural knowledge. In an exceptional debut, Ava Nathaniel Winter challenges our concepts of the beautiful and the sacred, delving not only into the historically marginalized, but also into the chilling subconscious of supremacy. "Let me be clear / from this beginning," she writes, "What I mean by beauty / is a terror I have fled from / into language."
Winter writes with a documentarian's attention, a poet's resonance. "I'm trying," she admits, "to find language for what we do / to one another." From Łódź, Poland, to predominantly white suburban America, from the space shared by queer lovers to antique cabinets filled with Nazi memorabilia, from Talmudic depictions of genderqueer rabbis to archival lynching photos, she regards the tender and the difficult with equal gravity, commemorates the fraught gift of survival.
At the heart of this collection—despite its moments of profound darkness—is a new, hard-won holiness. The "earthy aroma of rye" calling up a mother's baking, her mother's, hers. Belief in a lover's lavishing. A chosen future, one where we are "reader, sibling, sister." If Transgenesis began in fear of beauty, where it lands is this: "turning at last / to face her."
Contents
I. TRANSGENESIS
Torah Study
Transgenesis
Midrash
Playing with the Jew
The Letter Read
Confession
Puławy
To Ask Our Bodies
Playing with the Jew
II. ARCHIVED LIGHT
Lucky Jew
What the Suitcase Bearing My Family Name Might Have Contained When It Arrived at Auschwitz
Rollermills Antique Mall
The Fight
WWII German SS Division Soup Spoon "800 Silver," $250
WWII Concentration Camp Sleeve Patch Un-Cut, $75
Archived Light
Again I Shape Dough in Hours Set Aside for Writing
III. PLAYING WITH THE JEW
WWII SS Wiking Division Badge, $55
Hitler Youth Dagger RZM M7/13, $550 Firm
A Brass Band Heralds the Institute's Destruction
Archived Light
WWII German SS Lebensborn Stickpin, $30
To a Jazz Singer
Snow
Jasmin et Cigarette
Lament with Cello Accompaniment
Notes
Acknowledgments
