Too Wet To Take

Abstract

Too Wet To Take is a semi-autobiographical trans coming of middle age collection of poems written over the course of my medical transition from F to M, female to male. Blending a polyphonic poetics with she/her syntactical error, Too Wet To Take writes among the unbecoming aspects of trans affect in a mode of radical negativity. The work wonders what it means to author from within transition, and how this impacts notions of narrative and subjective authority. The work explores poetic strategies aimed at disrupting trans narrative and subjective authority contingent on legibility and assimilation. The work engages with questions of trans maladjustment, queer utopic futurity, and queer negativity, citing the work of theorists Cameron Awkward-Rich, José Esteban Muñoz, Lee Edelman, among others.