The Intro of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics Shares a Poetics for an Inverted World

Lit Hub has published an excerpt from the introduction to We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books), written by editors Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel. "What is the project of trans poetics?" they ask. A response, in part:

…As a collection of writing by trans people against capital and empire, this book attempts 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.

The second is the sense that poetry bears on the project of imagining and making actual a totally inverted world. We don’t hold that poetry is a form of, or replaces, political action. Poetry isn’t revolutionary practice; poetry provides a way to inhabit revolutionary practice, to ground ourselves in our relations to ourselves and each other, to think about an unevenly miserable world and to spit in its face. We believe that poetry can do things that theory can’t, that poetry leaps into what theory tends towards. We think that poetry conjoins and extends the interventions that trans people make into our lives and bodily presence in the world, which always have an aesthetic dimension. We assert that poetry should be an activity by and for everybody.

The project of the collection that follows is therefore a gamble of sorts. Can a poetics both ground itself in a particular social identity and speak expansively towards the present and its crises? Trans poetry has typically foregrounded the body, its uses and constraints, its uneven legibility, its relations to racial and colonial modes of categorization, its conscription into the wage and the working day; what else can this emphasis render into focus? How does a trans poetry translate itself across borders and languages, or account for the colonial conditions of its own emergence? 

More of this reflection on poetry of the trans present can be read at Lit Hub.