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Transgenesis
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.”
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.”
77 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 6, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 1, 2024
A thoughtful collection of beautifully written, meditative poems. Love how these pieces unpack questions about family history and bodies.
July 29, 2024
Haunting, breathtaking, remarkable.
March 19, 2024
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.
“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.
October 27, 2024
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"
Favorites:
"Pulawy"
"To Ask Our Bodies"
"What the Suitcase Bearing My Family Name Might Have Contained When It Arrived at Auschwitz"
"Snow"
October 31, 2024
A beautiful collection that will live rent free in my mind.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews