Transmasculine Poetics: Filling the Gap in Literature and the Silences Around Us edited by Remi Recchia

Featuring exclusively transmasculine poets, the anthology carves out a new space in queer poetics in which these poets can see themselves and be affirmed and understood in their identity, and in turn go forth to continue the vibrant and important work of telling and listening to transmasculine narratives. From visits to doctor’s offices told in haunting starkness, to bodies mourned and reborn in resolute resiliency, to scenes of queer love that border on the divine, this anthology invites readers into a new and relatively uncharted space, bearing witness to a world that society has tried to disappear, and listening to voices that have been silenced for much of history.

“Transmasculine Poetics: Filling the Gap in Literature & the Silences Around Us is packed with wonderful poems. It is an important anthology of trans voices echoing a desire to be and be accepted, but also, to be expected. From the anxiety of public restrooms and identity gaslighting to the euphoria of being truly seen by the self or a partner, this collection takes readers on an authentic journey. It is sensual, visceral, and resonant.”
–Aly Allen, author of Paying for Gas with Quarters

“To be transformed, to become a new self, to become what one always was, changed yet restored. What does it take, how does it happen, what courage, what secrecy, what tender comparisons, what many moments of trust and fear?  In this groundbreaking anthology, Transmasculine Poetics: Filling the Gap in Literature & the Silences Around Us, Remi Recchia offers us a selection of poets whose powerfully imaginative insight into these questions bespeaks the boldness and challenge of poetry itself.  There is humor here, and sweetness, and the magic and terror of the body as it fulfills or fails what the mind knows. The liminal and the determined—the overdetermined—are forever in tension in these poems, in company with the world and in the privacy of the probing soul. In bars, in bathrooms, in clothes, in hair, in plants, in animals, in everything that grows, these poets find their way through their lives, through all our lives, with unforgettable depth and breadth.”
–Lisa Lewis, author of The Body Double