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 Lódź, 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 this: “turning at last / to face her.”
About the Author:
Ava Nathaniel Winter is the author of Transgenesis, a winner of the National Poetry Series. Her poetry has appeared in The Baffler, Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, New Poetry From the Midwest, Poetry International, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Ava served as a Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University and received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. She holds an M.F.A. from the Ohio State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, where she teaches in the Department of English and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.
Praise for Transgenesis:
These poems of eros, erudition, and epistemologies achieve more than the sum of their parts; they hold the body in a care that’s rare in life and rarer still in words. Winter’s debut is a finely wrought gem, one that doesn’t shy away from centering the grand yet vexed idea of love—but rather expands on what love can do, what it is, and, ultimately, who it is for.—Ocean Vuong, author of Time is a Mother