Review of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics
(Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, Editors)
March 17, 2021
We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics
Nightboat Books
$22.95
You can purchase a copy here.
Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan
Poets of a certain age (the ones who can remember the ‘90s) will be well familiar with Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café and the impact it made and continues to make. I believe in its way We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel will be the anthology that speaks to and speaks for this decade. In their introduction to this anthology of diverse transgender voices “writing against capital and empire”, Abi-Karam and Gabriel seek “to piece together these multiple points of overlap between the subjective, interpersonal, and everyday modes of trans life, and the internationalist horizons of the fights we are already engaged in.” This impressive collection contains the works of approximately 70 writers, including prose pieces by Leslie Feinberg (Stone Butch Blues) and legendary trans activist, Sylvia Rivera. For this review, I have decided to single out four poets with ties to Philadelphia.
Faye Chevalier’s three poems in this anthology explore her relationship with characters played by the iconic Keanu Reeves in three of his early films: River’s Edge, My Own Private Idaho¸ and Permanent Record. In the powerful poem “Feral & Not Masc Enough for a Shoulder Tattoo,” she explores the verisimilitude of her university experience with the character Keanu played in River’s Edge. She hides her tattoos, a form of self-expression, by “wearing/ long sleeves in the summertime.” In this film, Keanu Reeves’ character, Matt, and his friends grapple with whether to report the murder of their friend’s girlfriend to the police. Matt is one of the few characters to feel some compunction to tell the authorities. In the last stanza, Chevalier pens the powerful lines: “young Keanu Reeves is posited/as both spectator & performer/of the act of rotting.” This poem along with the other two Keanu-inspired works are examples of ekphrastic poetry at its best, using finely-crafted verse to achieve art both cinematic and magical. This poem is one of several in the collection that examines the relationship between a poet and their body.
In “By the Gayborhood Shake Shack I Sat Down and Wept,” Holly Raymond writes an explosive piece whose soundscape and impeccable diction supply it with a pulsating, undeniable energy. Raymond paints a poetic picture of the tribulations faced by a trans academic:
I explain to 80,000 totally asleep-style swains
the way things are going to be
I am stomping on the head of my own vocation
they are staring impolitely at my alchemy tits
and forgetting what my name is
With the rage and anguish in the poem, she uses here well-honed skills to meld razor-sharp wit with heartbreak: “I may be mostly vegetarian/but here I am, weeping, with my fist inside the carrion.” She ends this poem with trademark eloquence: “I will not die in this town without/some other mammal’s hot blood/in my mouth.” One of the joys of anthologies, and I want to thank Abi-Karam and Gabriel for this, is the discovery of a new-to-you poet. I look forward to reading more of Holly Raymond’s work.
If you are familiar with Levi Bentley’s multi-layered poetry, you are well aware of their love of language. In the tradition of the best of the language poets, Bentley allows the reader to view language in new and surprising ways. Their poem “Slender Oat Rehearse” contains language redefining lines such as,
they put a fence up a line
of social text that keeps in capital, keeps out need
see, around the vegetable garden there
is a hole at the center
of the garden as deep as a grave
Their relationship with language is questioned, re-imagined into new configurations: “ and entering/ a kind of guerilla gardening i fall in and out of love with/language.” This poem requires and rewards multiple re-readings. This poem is an exhilarating work from a successfully ambitious poet.
Raquel Salas Rivera, the fourth Philadelphia Poet Laureate, evokes a hot day in Philadelphia in the summer of 2018. “Hot so/you dip your face in icecream pools/lap up the cracks.” Through the spell of Rivera’s craft, a hot summer’s day becomes more than a hot summer’s day. The poem morphs into a clarion call for environmental and social justice:
icebergs melt into things we can eat
or drink or dribble as if talking
but really what is say is soon we’ll be people again
and no one is listening from however we aren’t
ice arrests the usual calling making it matter hot
in cages
The thrill in this poem is how it keeps on changing, coursing along the impassioned, logical rhetoric of their mind. Even when the poem stops, it seems to keep on going. You hold conversations with it in your mind. That is the hallmark of a great poem written by a great poet.
We Want It All is the perfect anthology for readers who want to hold conversations with poems in their minds, to look at the world from a different lens, an intersectional lens of transgender, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, environmental, and racial identities. It forces the reader to confront the complexities of being transgender and of being human in the twenty-first century. Reading this anthology will expand your worldview. I firmly believe this anthology will be a resource for people looking for a way forward through the next century, as Aloud did and still does today.
Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (read review here) (2019 Cajun Mutt Press) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone Press) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). He is currently at work on several literary projects as well as teaching a chapbook class. He currently serves on the Moonstone Press Editorial Board, is head poetry editor for Toho, and is workshop instructor for Green Street Poetry.