I loved this collection so much. It is about transness and bodies and being between genders, fucking with gender and playing with bodies, about sex and joy and the earth and growing things and mostly I think it’s about being a human and making poems at the end of the world, which is happening every day. 

There is a lot in it about whiteness. I like the way she does this. It doesn’t feel like a performance, it feels vital, they way she positions herself and reckons with being white and with her ancestors. I think a lot of why this works so well is that this collection is so focused on bodies. What does it mean to have one, if you’re trans and you play with it, and then go out into the world with it? How does it feel, but also why did you do play in the way that you did? What are you doing with your body? How are you using your body? Why did you survive? What does it feel like in your body and what does it feel like to talk about it? 

Her poems about gender and expression and changing bodies and the intersection of knowing your body and identity and dealing with how the world sees you are so good. She complicates it all! There is no one way to be, no pure internal world, no ideal body. We are just here mudding along. 

There are a lot of prose poems and a lot of notes, a lot of nods to music, books, queer ancestors, which makes the collection feels expansive, like part of a long song. One of my favorite poems is a long prose poem that is basically a list of things we have to do, with the rephrase "we're done," as in: “it’s queer utopia or we’re done.” The stakes are so fucking high. 

She makes this work—the stakes—by writing these sweeping poems about empire and violence and gender binaries and movements and then she brings it back to sex, to the body, to dancing, to gardens, stemmy things. The whole book is grounded in material realties even as it grapples with imagining and building and anger and loss and ideas of gender outside of the body. 

I love the long lines, I love all the words like yr and bc, I love how loose and flowing it is. The poems are so vibrant, they are overly full at times. That what it feels like to have a beating heart in this world—overly full all the time. 

It’s like she is trying to find containers in these poems that are big enough for all the stuff she wants to put in them, and she doesn’t quite do it. The notes section often says: there are actually tons more references, these are just the main ones. So the poems are always spilling out and over each other, always reaching and not always arriving. Again, this is what it feels like to make poems and to live, always reaching, making newer and bigger and more beautiful containers and never quite making enough. Never quite getting there, but as she says in one poem, “we cannot be done.”