Dear Herculine

by Aaron Apps

Dear Herculine, a harrowingly eloquent cri de coeur, melds consciousnesses and bodies across one and a half centuries, from 1832–2014. Intersexed writer Aaron Apps to intersex reader, the long-dead martyr to early gender-reassignment surgery, Herculine Barbin, speaks from a place so far inside of the abjected subject that it comes out the other end as estranged, engorged and gorgeous language, in letters comprising ‘two intersexed bodies composed of multiple parts, and the mess of flesh and text that stands between.’ Unlike Yeats, who desired to be consumed in artifice to escape the human condition, that of being ‘sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal/[That] knows not what it is,’ Apps plunges into the carnal killing floor with his nineteenth-century interlocutor, binding their fates as he is ‘shackled to a rotting double, rotting in the space between, rotting in the space of the letters.’ Apps’s fearlessness and the beauty of his prose inspires, pushing poetry, kicking and screaming and expiring with shame, to where it desperately wants to go. A brilliant achievement that defies the triumphalism of that descriptor, Dear Herculine is a cache of love letters urgently needed to heal this world.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Transgender, Intersex

91 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

Reviews

[Jaime]

I really hated this book. It was well written but maybe because I'm intersex too I was too close to the subject of the poetry to feel anything other than ugly from reading it. There's only so many times you can read references to intersex bodies being full of black slime before you just want to rip your own skin off to clean your soul underneath because it makes you feel dirty.

[Karlié]

"We who phosphoresce."

[anna marie]

content notes 4 this review: coercive medical procedures, suicide, vomit, bodies/body gore,

i can't rate this because on the one hand yes! good!! everyone should read this in some form!! maybe not all of it because.... on the other hand, this was Very Obviously written by someone doing a Phd so into academia that they think more words = more profundity and more cleverness when in reality that is not the case.

here is a list of things this was about:
Bodies!!
intersex people, specifically the author, aaron and the person he is writing to, Herculine, a 19th century intersex person who was operated on and subsequently committed suicide.
shame
connections/sex[in the act way but also in the body way]
nakedness in all sense
Philosophy
death,
monstrosity-ish,/deformity,
slime
vomit
grotesqueness
body histories
medical histories and oppression
slugs,
trauma and grief
suicide
writing
slurs against intersex people

also just a heads up there is an image of Herculine's body that is repeated throughout this and it is very sad because that is all they have of them - only the medicalised, oppressive and disgusting approach to Herculine's body and no other thing.
so yes. i dont know what else to say/ how to talk about this but i hope this makes sense

[sewena]

rec'd from a friend, who described this collection as 'moist.' i see why, although i didn't feel the moisture quite as much haha. i did feel circulation, obsession, which makes sense. the premise is apps reading herculine's memoir while also grieving the loss of a friend, and also thinking of his own life and relation to transness. i enjoyed the word play and the articulation of ideas. in certain ways these poems felt more like letters or perhaps a memoir rather than poetry; but that's another conversation for another time!

[Hope]

Maybe I'm just too close to the subject matter, but I really didn't enjoy this book. It was gross and gritty, and obviously written to be so, but I still couldn't bring myself to fully appreciate it, for all that. The language, however, is incredibly descriptive, and I do have to admit that it brought on plenty of feelings.

[L]

Original and impressive.

[Essa Ranapiri]

We are grubby somethings swimming in a dark made of endings. This book was written inside the animal terror of loss. Of disgust. Of something we need to get out. I owe a lot to this book, a book I could I only read one epistolary from a day for the wracking. Its words happen to the body and they are not always kind. But this is poetry that needed to escape the mouth. To leave marks on a page and be. Just be.

[Bogi Takács]

My review is now online: http://www.bogireadstheworld.com/poet...

Source of the book: Bought with my own money