Category: eden heffron-hanson

Book Review: missed connections with tall girls by Gwen Aube

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
missed connections with tall girls
BY GWEN AUBE

A BOOK REVIEW BY EDEN HEFFRON-HANSON

It’s the poet’s right, according to the Russian Futurists, to use “arbitrary and derivative words”. For Myakovsky, in fact, it was a “social command”, a requirement to translate colloquial speech onto the page following increases in literacy after the Revolution. Similarly, as trans presses do away with the market-oriented eyes of cis editors, beautiful phrases lurch out of Omegle chat rooms in knee-high socks and cat ears. We are blessed with language that is not only geared towards trans audiences, but would hopefully piss off, confuse, and be unintelligible to most cis ones. 

Gwen Aube’s missed connections with tall girls is a book that spoils us with such language. A collection of vignettes of “oddball trannies”, it is filled to the brim with bawdy colloquialisms, manifestos, and general debauchery of every kind. It has “girldick”, HSTS vs AGP kandi, traps, “kkkanada”, and blood pacts. It is the sounds of dolls awkwardly crowding into bars, Montreal train yards, and half-bird girls smuggling away hamburgers. It is a book that is warm, and loud, and will make you cackle so heinously your roommate asks what you are choking on.

The poetry is funny, and carries so much character, that it is hard to realize how earnest it is. Aube brings the poetic voice of a self-identified “flop-house bitch”, yearning after eponymous “missed connections” of a cast of stragglers, vagabonds, and cast-off trans women. The politics of the poetry throughout are a working-class evangelical trannyism, with shade reserved for those that would scorn solidarity for the sake of upward mobility i.e., girls on their snobby stealth or true transexual bullshit.

The first section holds stories of rebuffs and missed connections underscored by class or social anxiety, but transitions to a second interspersed with a chorus of all-caps stanzas laying out the voice of “AN OLD GENDER CRITICAL FRIEND”. Aube’s double ventriloquism satirizes the far-right conspiracy theorist while simultaneously proclaiming the warmth of T4T collectivism:

COME YE NEEDY AND BROKEN
GIRLS—BRAID TOGETHER YE
WEARY BODIES— BATHE IN

THE GIGGLING COVENANT—

Aube explores the part Western transsexuality plays in the imperial project. When a group that relies on solidarity for its survival finds state legitimization, what purpose could it serve? The poet reflects on the infamous but mythological “Lockheed girl”, on the CIA-backed PEN International giving Aube a literary award, and on the fact that western queer claiming of the Greek Galli opens Mount Ida for Canadian mining interests. Among this horror, the poet longs for pre-legitimization, to be declared a “freak unfit for labor” outside the tools of the Western project. Yet, the voice proselytizes this is the place we stand once again, amid an apocalyptic “HETEROGENOUS REJECTION” which leaves “PURSES CUT, OUR TEMPLES DESTROYED, OUR CHILDREN SLAUGHTERED”. But this is rarely a poetry collection settling into despair, and it is here, in this post-Revelations world, that bourgeois trans life rediscovers its fetishized “underground”, reapproaching the place where “LOVE WINS” is more than a bumper sticker.

Author Gwen Aube

However, Aube’s poetic voice is too compassionate to assert that a direct confrontation with fascism will be a net positive if it creates class love among trans women. The third section is, among other things, a guide on mogging the welfare office. In the different presentations Aube’s narrator has in the chapter, wearing a fur coat to the welfare office, getting stared at for the holes in her shoes by “the state itself”, or living off arts grants “before I even had a book out”, we see the poet leveraging what is meant to be a static class/caste system. Combined with For Herma, the longer ekphrastic poem making up the last section of the book, it becomes clear that, for the poet, love already overwhelmingly exists in trans life when it is separated from capitalist values. The poet works to reckon with “tranny wiping poopy ass—tranny attending the PTA meeting—tranny pushing the stroller” but is easily able to resolve to “find some boy in an alley and groom him to be my daughter”. For Herma makes connections to family in all its forms, it is the poet’s reckoning with growing into an elder through queer or conventional motherhood. A deep love orbits the vignettes and portraits of the book, for all the girls that she fails to connect with, for Nevada, casey, syb, and for the traps and dolls that populate the book’s pages. It becomes clear that uncoupled from institutional validation, bourgeois aspiration, and the nuclear family love is still intertwined with survival. However, it is a love that is subject to state indifference, if not violence, and generally deserves the downfall of the West to prosper. 

It is an important book for anyone interested in what trans poetics can do. If the goal is to repudiate fishy girls that run away with boys, or the ones that tell you to fuck off in doctor’s offices, if it’s to support the spirit of grooming as a beautiful plot to increase the warmth of the trans project, then it succeeds. It’s a book I felt too bougie, too Statesian, and a little too young to fully get. Aube’s hilarious writing is a layered satire, using joy and irony to explore transness and class at multiple levels. If it stumbles anywhere, it’s that the written poetry can’t match the energy of Aube’s readings, existing between page and voice to demand gathering. It is a book inline with Bambara’s irresistible revolution, proselytizing love in the corners where the state can’t or won’t reach, a collection that dreams pretty, audacious, blasphemous dreams. Dreams that are summed up best in some of the final lines of the book:

“let no woman be without sister…

let rains bless the women

which have made themselves women

for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” 

MISSED CONNECTIONS WITH TALL GIRLS

BY GWEN AUBE

AVAILABLE THROUGH LITTLE PUSS PRESS

Eden Heffron-Hanson is a writer and poet living in Queens, New York. She traditionally writes love poems but in her down time would looooove to review your work (edenheffha@gmail.com or @edenheffha on Instagram). She has been published in Beyond the Veil Press, South Broadway Press, and Trans Mag.

Book Review: Brooklyn ave. Hymnal by Andy Riley

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
BROOKLYN AVE. HYMNAL BY ANDY RILEY

A BOOK REVIEW BY EDEN HEFFRON-HANSON

One of my main impressions of Andy has always been that he prints chapbooks like other poets print rejection slips. The first time I met him, at Wolverine Publick House in Fort Collins, he was carrying a bundle of self-printed books for the reading. Later, when he invited me over for homemade absinthe, he had more from the past year for me, from the “early years”. While I have long delighted in his exciting cacophonic phrasing and interesting imagery, what I have most admired from him was the nonstop DIY ethic which kept him writing and printing instead of waiting for approval. 

Thus, it is with great pleasure I am reviewing Andy Riley’s debut 87-page serial poem Brooklyn ave. Hymnal. A book about moving to Seattle that is so rife with character observations and daily ennui, chronic pain and stunted sex drives, that truly it will leave you searching for an answer to the question, why would you move to Seattle? 

 Maybe it’s so Riley could “get out to see Red Pine” from Seattle or live on the street of the “high school where sir mix a lot went”, perhaps it’s so he could live a ten-minute walk from “three old growth trees”. Or maybe Riley moved to Seattle for the same reason anyone moves anywhere, to see something new and make sense of it, to turn around and produce a work of art grounded deeply in a place and time that hadn’t grown dull from repetition. What we receive is a poem facing down the alienation and loneliness of being literally ungrounded. We receive addresses to the dead and separated, to long distance friends, and the ever-aloof state of Colorado. 

Author Andy Riley

We are introduced to a poet navigating public space and the struggle for connection between strangers. I delighted in the man in camo pants trying to train surf, the howler under the tunnel on the light rail, and the couple who waves back at the narrator from under the bridge. The poem builds us a world of characters vying for attention, a series of exhibitionists mirroring the short, showy writing of the poetry itself. 

Having read shorter renditions of Riley’s writing, the sometimes-eclectic chapbooks he described as his “EPs”, I was excited to see how his style would take to a book-length poem. The use of short sequences allows for concentrated bursts of energy sympathetic to his style, while the relationality allows for an opening up into moments of satori. One of my favorite sections in the poem is election day which both contains the rapid fire “bodily steam footfalls mirage/ like climbing a ladder” and the wide-open couplet “hate of the unknown is traditional/what of this hate of the known”.  The book also shares my love of nouns you can grind your teeth on. Brooklyn ave. uses to full effect the regional “noggins”, the scientific yet punk “oxytocin boot black”, and a whole quatrain about “priapism”. More space allows Riley more exploration in word choice and sound, and it’s lovely to see him opt for a yummy and timely dialect.

The building blocks of short poems translate into a feeling of discovery throughout each that Riley deftly sustains through the book.

Riley’s adjective phrasing, which delights in novel syntax while also bending the grammar of sentences, help him create metaphors from bite sized lines of language. Lines like “no flower columbine”, “smack gridlock/migraine-iacal car-ships” or even the simple “ATM smoke shop” recreate adjectives from modifiers into carriers of essential natures for each of the nouns. The building blocks of short poems translate into a feeling of discovery throughout each that Riley deftly sustains through the book. 

The only places of the book that confused me were moments of rhyme where the poet slips into a register more reminiscent of Shelly and Dickinson than Weiners or Spicer. Compared to the breakneck speed at which the poetry generally moves the section “the dawn nay dies/it flies.” or “ah/T-shaped wisteria” felt lethargic. However, the register never seems to be employed without irony or self-awareness and there are plenty of moments where rhyme or abstraction is seasoned to taste in the poem. There are also brilliant sections subverting form such as the telegram-like “when I speak” section. Overall, the spots that stick out and interrupt the flow of the poem are done with subtlety and creativity that brings the larger project in balance with itself. 

We may never know why one moves to Seattle. However, we do know what one does with the experience. Riley gives us an istoria making sense of public space and loneliness in a large explorative sequence. Brooklyn ave. Hymnal is an assertive ennui filled poem making sense of the daily mess that we each navigate to produce art. The creativity and power of his style is on full force here while his craft remains a love letter to poets like John Weiners and Frank O’Hara that have long informed his work. It’s a delight to have such a strong showing from such a young western poet.

BROOKLYN AVE. HYMNAL

BY ANDY RILEY

AVAILABLE THROUGH PILOT PRESS

Eden Heffron-Hanson is a writer and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. She traditionally writes love poems but in her down time would looooove to review your work (edenheffha@gmail.com or @edenheffha on Instagram). She has been published in Beyond the Veil Press, South Broadway Press, and Mountain Bluebird Magazine.