Transgenesis

Préface

• Digital galley campaign, with outreach targeted at major, poetry, feminist and regional media, as well as booksellers and librarians; digital galley available for download on Edelweiss
• Advertising with the Academy of American Poets
• Special promotion in collaboration with the National Poetry Series
• Newsletter promotion via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 70K contacts
• Targeted Academic outreach
• Major launch in Lincoln, Nebraska

Auteur

Ava Nathaniel Winter is the author of Transgenesis, selected by Sean Hill for the 2023 National Poetry Series, and the poetry chapbook Safe House. Her work has appeared in The Baffler, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry International, Room, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She served as a Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University and received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Winter holds an MFA from the Ohio State University and a PhD from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she teaches in the Department of English and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

Texte du rabat

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 this: “turning at last / to face her.”

Contenu

I. TRANSGENESIS

Torah Study

Transgenesis  

Midrash

Playing with the Jew

The Letter Read

Confession

Puławy

To Ask Our Bodies  

Playing with the Jew

 

II. ARCHIVED LIGHT

Lucky Jew

What the Suitcase Bearing My Family Name Might Have Contained When It Arrived at Auschwitz

Rollermills Antique Mall

The Fight

WWII German SS Division Soup Spoon “800 Silver,” $250

WWII Concentration Camp Sleeve Patch Un-Cut, $75

Archived Light

Again I Shape Dough in Hours Set Aside for Writing

 

III. PLAYING WITH THE JEW

WWII SS Wiking Division Badge, $55

Hitler Youth Dagger RZM M7/13, $550 Firm

A Brass Band Heralds the Institute’s Destruction

Archived Light

WWII German SS Lebensborn Stickpin, $30

To a Jazz Singer

Snow

Jasmin et Cigarette

Lament with Cello Accompaniment

 

Notes

Acknowledgments