Past traumas trumped by trans present

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This article was published 22/03/2025 (230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In jaye simpson’s deeply affecting second collection, a body more tolerable (Arsenal Pulp, 88 pages, $20), the speaker attempts to come to terms with the griefs and traumas of her past and envision a future. The collection is structured such that the speaker moves toward “shedding this shivering skin/ gathering at the seams,” as she writes in the final poem.

Among the themes running through the collection is the question of where the speaker can find home: “what constitutes the difference/ between these // cracking // walls now in this apartment/ &/ the \ dampened \ ones in the basement of then?” Home, body and desire are each refracted through simpson’s use of the myth of Persephone, Demeter and Hades: “i have climbed from my throne/ underneath & hand fed/ my lovers pomegranate seed after pomegranate seed,” she writes in “being undone.”

Transness unifies the semantic content of the poems and the structure of the collection. i forgive me is a hinge point in the collection, where the speaker takes stock of the past, of everything womanhood entails, including contradictions she feels deeply: “i saw the ruin in my future womanhood,” simpson writes, ” a collection of ideology i beg to reject/ yet i find the hearth warmed.”

This poem, and the collection itself, are testaments to transness and embracing oneself as a path to power, “abundance” and openness.

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The Seated Woman (Anansi, 72 pages, $23), by Clémence Dumas-Côté and translated by E. S. Taillon, uses a dialogue between the Seated Woman and the Poems to create a collection at once expansive and claustrophobic.

This dialogue advances a linguistic and imagistic narrative, where sound creates a tension between tight control and entropy. In the opening pages, the “n” sounds gradually open as the dialogue progresses. The Seated Woman’s “reddening star/ at the end of its savings” opens sonically as the images move toward “a chaos/ that you would call devastation.”

In the voice of the Poem, the images expand the starkness of the relatively short sections, by evoking otherworldly landscapes, as in “We wish to breath in your most beautiful phantom landscape.” These landscapes have a synesthetic quality, “your specter convulses/ a drum solo in the eye.”

In contrast and in concert, the Seated Woman takes echoes from the Poems’ images and grounds them, sometimes forcibly, in the body: “In preparation for the fair/ you’ll have to find the page that contains me.// My alkaline body/ did I tell you?/ I will decompose./ She sings.”

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In his debut This Sweet Rupture (University of Alberta Press, 72 pages, $20), Omar Ramadan confronts cultural frictions surrounding race, migration and religion conditioned by the dominant Canadian culture. This confrontation occurs in Ramadan’s formal choices — the choice to include untranslated Arabic script, for example, as well as in the semantic content of the poems.

In Your First Beheading Video — Part II, he considers Canadian racism as enacted in an airport: “but do my nights disappear/ when I step into the airport, through revolving glass doors,/ [… .] or after check-in, when the person manning the desk/ lets my just overweight baggage filled with an extra bag/ of Hershey’s chipits from Costco through.”

Underlying this opening is the unstated friction of racism, which Ramadan makes explicit in the poem’s end: “Would joking about bazookas been okay for a couple of teens/ lulled into a false sense of security by a jokey cop?/ The K-9 German Shepherd pacing up and down the/ walkway/ her handler in tow looking like they were ready for/ anything:/ imaginary bazookas, imaginary ISIS affiliates,/ imaginary/ rights.”

Ramadan blends images of domesticity and turbulence throughout. In When Al Jazeera Newscasters Stopped Speaking, Circa 2004, he takes the post-American invasion of Iraq, post-invasion of Afghanistan moment and filters all that grief and terror through a series of domestic images: “Here, I listened/ to the endless falling of a knife/ gliding through onion flesh/ forcing from the crevasses/ avalanches of tears/ not meant for onions.”

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.