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Postcard Poems
- GenresPoetryLGBTTransgender
36 pages, ebook
First published June 25, 2014
About the author
Jamie Berrout
24 books74 followersJamie Berrout is an editor and the author of books of poetry, essays, and fiction. She grew up on the South Texas border.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 26, 2016
“How is a poem more than a record of the things I wrote before being killed?”
Jamie Berrout shows us how in every interaction – at the courthouse, in the clinic, at home, in the street – the stakes for trans women of color are always high, and one of her work’s most pressing concerns is to explore how pervasive violence directed at you and others like you shapes your sense of self.
Her language is spare and direct; many of the stories read like parables. They withhold even as they get real, perhaps because the speaker experiences the world from such a great distance that every space is mediated by her remove from it. Still, the drive to connect powers this book. She answers her question about what a poem can be by looking outward. Her work is a poetics of self-preservation through the movement towards relation. “Poetry: now there is no distance between us.”
One of the great powers of these poems is their restorative fantasy. Berrout highlights the surreality of everyday dealings with cis people, from city bureaucracy to retail, then enacts revenge. Here, the clerks and guards who laugh at you so uproariously double over as their lungs collapse with the stolen breath of their casual bigotry. Then, in Los Angeles,
"I was too tall for the clothing in the stores. Whenever I stuck my head in a clothing store, the clerks would yell and shake their heads at me. I stopped wearing clothes. Now when I step over the rows of cars on my way to work, people are even more confused than before. The people are afraid of me; they are repulsed by me; but they are unsettled by their attraction toward me: each of them, alone at night in their rooms will meditate on my image and, perhaps, revise their prejudices. I will be destroyed by them for existing or I will destroy their illusions."
Through her refusal to stop being a visibly outsized, indecent, confrontational being, the speaker imagines one way trans people can stop contorting ourselves into a world not made to fit us. We’ll bust it open or be busted by it, but it can’t go on like this.
These moments of fantasy feel stabilizing, but I appreciate that Berrout doesn’t end at a reassurance that we deserve to exist. The narrative returns again and again to the difficulty of that existence, denying resolution. I don’t know if I’ve ever read another line of poetry that does to me what this one does: “I want my shame to stop what it is doing.” There is something so hopeless and hopeful at once – shame is a feature, to tame like cowlicked hair. Somehow it is hers and yet not something she is doing to herself, both intrinsic to her and not. It feels at once like something possible and impossible to change.
Jamie Berrout shows us how in every interaction – at the courthouse, in the clinic, at home, in the street – the stakes for trans women of color are always high, and one of her work’s most pressing concerns is to explore how pervasive violence directed at you and others like you shapes your sense of self.
Her language is spare and direct; many of the stories read like parables. They withhold even as they get real, perhaps because the speaker experiences the world from such a great distance that every space is mediated by her remove from it. Still, the drive to connect powers this book. She answers her question about what a poem can be by looking outward. Her work is a poetics of self-preservation through the movement towards relation. “Poetry: now there is no distance between us.”
One of the great powers of these poems is their restorative fantasy. Berrout highlights the surreality of everyday dealings with cis people, from city bureaucracy to retail, then enacts revenge. Here, the clerks and guards who laugh at you so uproariously double over as their lungs collapse with the stolen breath of their casual bigotry. Then, in Los Angeles,
"I was too tall for the clothing in the stores. Whenever I stuck my head in a clothing store, the clerks would yell and shake their heads at me. I stopped wearing clothes. Now when I step over the rows of cars on my way to work, people are even more confused than before. The people are afraid of me; they are repulsed by me; but they are unsettled by their attraction toward me: each of them, alone at night in their rooms will meditate on my image and, perhaps, revise their prejudices. I will be destroyed by them for existing or I will destroy their illusions."
Through her refusal to stop being a visibly outsized, indecent, confrontational being, the speaker imagines one way trans people can stop contorting ourselves into a world not made to fit us. We’ll bust it open or be busted by it, but it can’t go on like this.
These moments of fantasy feel stabilizing, but I appreciate that Berrout doesn’t end at a reassurance that we deserve to exist. The narrative returns again and again to the difficulty of that existence, denying resolution. I don’t know if I’ve ever read another line of poetry that does to me what this one does: “I want my shame to stop what it is doing.” There is something so hopeless and hopeful at once – shame is a feature, to tame like cowlicked hair. Somehow it is hers and yet not something she is doing to herself, both intrinsic to her and not. It feels at once like something possible and impossible to change.
September 28, 2015
beautiful, moving, etc
At the courthouse it is no good. At the counter on the second floor I say to the clerks, “I’d like to correct my documents.” The clerks start laughing and take small steps away from me. When I don’t leave they ring the magistrate on the phone. To the handset held out to me I say, “I want to live like anyone else, secure in my rights, without having to fear for my life.” His laughter cuts through the receiver; but once the magistrate gets going he is unable to stop laughing. After a minute of this, his lungs collapse. The clerks, still snickering behind the counter: their lungs also collapse. On my way out, I see the guards who had stopped me on my way inside (they had laughed and torn apart the books in my bag and put their hands on me for what was called a search). The guards now sit together, holding one another, nursing their freshly collapsed lungs. I walk around the city for a long time and it is perfectly quiet.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews