Transgenesis

by Ava Winter

An excavatory collection of poems tracing the connections between Jewish transfemininity, queer desire, and cultural histories.

Selected by Sean Hill for the National Poetry Series, this collection is a scrupulous chronicle of individual and cultural knowledge. In an exceptional debut, Ava Nathaniel Winter challenges our concepts of the beautiful and the sacred, delving not only into the historically marginalized, but also into the chilling subconscious of supremacy. “Let me be clear / from this beginning,” she writes, “What I mean by beauty / is a terror I have fled from / into language.”

Winter writes with a documentarian’s attention, a poet’s resonance. “I’m trying,” she admits, “to find language for what we do / to one another.” From Łódź, Poland, to predominantly white suburban America, from the space shared by queer lovers to antique cabinets filled with Nazi memorabilia, from Talmudic depictions of genderqueer rabbis to archival lynching photos, she regards the tender and the difficult with equal gravity, commemorates the fraught gift of survival.

At the heart of this collection—despite its moments of profound darkness—is a new, hard-won holiness. The “earthy aroma of rye” calling up a mother’s baking, her mother’s, hers. Belief in a lover’s lavishing. A chosen future, one where we are “reader, sibling, sister.” If Transgenesis began in fear of beauty, where it lands is “turning at last / to face her.”

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer

96 pages, Paperback

Published August 6, 2024

Reviews

[Liz Mc2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought-provoking exploration of trans and Jewish identities and their intersections. The playfulness, beauty, vulnerability and fear of being a marginalized body. The weight of cultural history.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoughtful collection of beautifully written, meditative poems. Love how these pieces unpack questions about family history and bodies.

[Madison Sides · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some really great stuff in here! I’m not super familiar with Judaism (nor WWII) so some of the content in the poems just felt out of reach for me, but the notes section at the back is impressive and I respect the amount of work and research that went into this collection. The last line is so great - “I enter the silence where my voice will take shape / looking for a certain stillness—the light, a razor.” I was also partial to the poems “Snow” and “Jasmin et Cigarette.”

[Lo Celeste Riddell · Rating 5 out of 5]

really really really really really good.

favorites:
- Torah Study
- Midrash
- Lucky Jew
- What the Suitcase Bearing My Family Name Might Have Contained When it Arrived at Auschwitz
- Snow

[Chelsea Francis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting, breathtaking, remarkable.

[Mya Matteo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am floored by this collection.

“For millennia / it has been written: there is beauty / in such queer and fruitless bodies.”

Transgenesis draws on the Torah’s explicit and implicitly queer / trans affirming passages and finds catharsis inside. “the body is holy / and is made holy in its changing”. “To Ask Our Bodies” is gorgeous t4t love poem. “sometimes [...] touching the body i want to have [...] is as close as i get to touching myself”. The speaker also consistently grapples with her own whiteness, privilege, and complicity despite historical trauma + suffering of her people. Every poem is intentional, searching, and confident in the weight of all that it grapples with.

[Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You tell me I could write without worry, / knowing the cost of keeping a body, / how little might be left for language / after the daily labor of living."

This collection absolutely blew me away. I normally read poetry collections in sections, but once I started this, I couldn't stop. Favorites from the collection include:

To Ask Our Bodies, What the Suitcase Bearing My Family Name Might Have Contained When It Arrived at Auschwitz, Rollermills Antique Mall, Again I Shape Dough in Hours Set Aside for Writing, Hitler Youth Dagger RZM M7 / 13 $550 Firm, A Brass Band Heralds the Institute's Destruction, To a Jazz Singer, Snow, and Lament with Cello Accompaniment.

A beautiful collection all around, and one I would absolutely revisit again.

[lillian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful writing. Winter's voice is raw and shines through in her pages. I have come away from this collection with a new knowledge of the human experience. And isn't that the very purpose of poetry?

Favorites:
"Pulawy"
"To Ask Our Bodies"
"What the Suitcase Bearing My Family Name Might Have Contained When It Arrived at Auschwitz"
"Snow"

[Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

The way this picks apart and examines its interests--Nazi memorabilia and the people who collect it, Jewish identity, gender and queerness, sex and power--is visceral yet tender and precise. It's rare that I devour a collection so quickly, eager to see where the next poem takes me.

[Plague Rat · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautiful collection that will live rent free in my mind.

[Annabelle Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning

[M. Imig · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really fabulous collection of poetry. Winter writes tenderly and truthfully, two expensive commodities. I particularly loved “Archived Light”.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the poem "A Brass Band Heralds the Institute's Destruction".