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Dualities
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Jason Phoebe Rusch is a queer writer from the Chicago suburbs. His full-length debut DUALITIES explores gender and patriarchy from the perspective of a man who was socialized and is currently still read as a woman. He is interested in complication and nuance and messy human failing, his own and that of others.
104 pages, Paperback
Published March 25, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 30, 2018
Review below is from the intro of an interview I did with the author. Full interview here: https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2018/0...
I met Jason Phoebe Rusch after I read an essay he wrote for Luna Luna, connected deeply with it, and realized that we lived in the same city. I shamelessly reached out to him on Twitter in the hope that we’d be friends. Back then, I knew him as just “Phoebe.” When we first met up for drinks at a Mexican restaurant, Jason was in makeup and a dress and was wrapping up a seemingly very hetero date. Since then, we’ve grown to be close friends, and in the fall of 2016, he came out as trans. Over the past couple years, we’ve read one another’s writing for feedback and support, so I got the chance to read a few iterations of this manuscript before publication. The collection was previously titled Two in One Flesh, and while I loved that title, Dualities seems to better encapsulate the collection’s eclectic subject matter.
Dualities is structured in four distinct sections: “Lake Forest,” “Lovers,” “Questioning,” and “Becoming.” As the new title suggests, the collection explores a range of dualities that have shaped Jason’s life. Many poems are about sexual identity (loving both men and women) and gender identity (having grown up presenting as a woman and now living as a trans man). Others examine Jason’s childhood in an affluent suburb as the child of working-class parents. There’s also a section about Jason’s experiences in Haiti that reflects on racial privilege. In short, Dualities is ambitious, multi-faceted, and incredibly compelling.
I met Jason Phoebe Rusch after I read an essay he wrote for Luna Luna, connected deeply with it, and realized that we lived in the same city. I shamelessly reached out to him on Twitter in the hope that we’d be friends. Back then, I knew him as just “Phoebe.” When we first met up for drinks at a Mexican restaurant, Jason was in makeup and a dress and was wrapping up a seemingly very hetero date. Since then, we’ve grown to be close friends, and in the fall of 2016, he came out as trans. Over the past couple years, we’ve read one another’s writing for feedback and support, so I got the chance to read a few iterations of this manuscript before publication. The collection was previously titled Two in One Flesh, and while I loved that title, Dualities seems to better encapsulate the collection’s eclectic subject matter.
Dualities is structured in four distinct sections: “Lake Forest,” “Lovers,” “Questioning,” and “Becoming.” As the new title suggests, the collection explores a range of dualities that have shaped Jason’s life. Many poems are about sexual identity (loving both men and women) and gender identity (having grown up presenting as a woman and now living as a trans man). Others examine Jason’s childhood in an affluent suburb as the child of working-class parents. There’s also a section about Jason’s experiences in Haiti that reflects on racial privilege. In short, Dualities is ambitious, multi-faceted, and incredibly compelling.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews