paper • 123 pages • 17.95
ISBN: 978-1-961897-16-8
eISBN: 978-1-961897-17-5
September 2024 • Poetry
In her debut collection, TRANZ, Spencer Williams writes equally riotous and vulnerable poems, penning a love letter to trans people and their audacity to exist in a world that constantly endangers them structurally and individually. Her blistering lyrics and acerbic wit never flatten her subjects but rather filet normative hypocrisy to reveal unspoken truths. Williams observes, “i am not dangerous until i’m made in the mouth / of someone who fears me,” and remembers receiving apologies whose “guilty resonance burns / like a wet willy from god.” She articulates a vast landscape of physical and ideological violence against trans people by illuminating this fundamental paradox: “i can’t fear u less until u fear me less—.” And yet the radical poetics of TRANZ is a celebratory self-becoming. Because of Williams’ subversive genius and lyrical grace, every indictment is also a declaration of triumph, a reminder that the ever-dynamic trans community continues to thrive despite, not through, its opposition to an antagonistic cultural discourse. In every place, in every time, trans people are enduring. Extant. “on the milk carton. on the public access / television. everywhere i go i am there so brutally.”
from laramie
when i was young / my parents
drove us through laramie /
and as a child / i knew not one / smear of history /
least of all / a faggot’s / but in the car / dad cut
the sound / of a cd skipping / until /
just the three of us / me / my mom
and him / all quiet / a blur of town /
a ghost / or a gasp / framed by window /
faggot in the blood / faggot in the field /
i didn’t know / the middle of nowhere
is also a place / people live / and die in /
but i’ve been there / intimately /
miraculously / am grown / perhaps in
the only time / i can be / a gust / if that /
or / anywhere i choose / just barely.
I have waited my whole life for Spencer Williams’ debut collection, TRANZ. This isn’t hyperbole. As I read Williams, I feel for once, something so intangibly complex about being trans and alive articulated—passed along like the gift that is a love note passed in class. She writes, “i didn’t get murdered and this / doesn’t have to be the moral even as it remains the goal…” These poems gut me as much as they comfort me; they feel like kin; they feel like the whispers of liberation. Williams writes, “everywhere i go i am there so brutally.” And I feel the truth of this in my brutally aching bones. Later she writes, “everywhere i go, i am made of / some kind of sun.” And I feel all her warmth, too.
“in this new state we call safe” Spencer Williams forges and reforges herself, mixing metaphor with harsh reality, finds a faith and focus in the vertigo of mess that is transition. This is a bratty, brutal, honest poetics, demanding the reader meet the poet in the muck and feel the feelings that the drugs can’t keep walling off—forcing us to fully exist (the horror and the pleasure of existence!)— inside the Z between “tran” and “gender.” Chest-tight, Williams holds us in that between. Rigorously reframing the violence of the frame itself, closing the distance between the body and the world that circumscribes it in verse that thrills with the beauty of lightning striking a dead tree: “no canvas wide enough to capture the landscape it inspires: / dainty, fleshing hills, swollen clouds of milk, / a crowd of poppies / gathering like pigeons over bread…” In poems so pressing they can’t conform to stable margins, Williams reiterates a wow—still here, still vibrant in the face of fucking everything.
Spencer Williams’ TRANZ manages to balance paeans of trans body euphoria while holding mother and sister hunger in the other quivering hand. The vulnerability of the teenage speaker who longs to “learn / kelly clarkson songs on bass” becomes your vulnerability. The persistent side-eye to god becomes your side-eye to god. Here, Williams makes a case for an apocalyptic trans sensibility, as spiny as it is transcendent. It’s an invitation to a world the speaker knows, where even at the end there’s still time to say “hello. / hello.”