Transgenesis

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 documentarians attention, a poets resonance. Im trying, she admits, to find language for what we do / to one another. From d, 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 collectiondespite its moments of profound darknessis a new, hard-won holiness. The earthy aroma of rye calling up a mothers baking, her mothers, hers. Belief in a lovers 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.