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imogen xtian smith is a poet & performer. They live & work on Lenape lands / NYC.
“In this resplendent debut, selfhood is fluid and ungovernable.
[...] A lyric meditation on—and reckoning with—the author’s
experience as a trans person, this collection delivers a
provocative and original study of queer embodiment, and a sensitive
exploration of grief.”—Publishers Weekly
“imogen xtian smith’s queer ecopoetry debut, stemmy things,
includes prose poems and free verse organized across couplets and
quatrains or spread more organically across the page, all of it
imbued with the sensibility of a DJ (there are references to
Nirvana, Coltrane, and R.E.M., alongside the Jesus and Mary Chain
and SOPHIE), as smith illuminates how transness is and was
always-already natural and part of our ecology.”—Layla
Benitez-James, Harriet Books
“smith doesn’t hold anything back, cussing frequently and creating
their own words out of conjunctions and abbreviated words, but the
result is a tapestry of language that beguiles, tricks, and teases.
This is a collection which will be meaningful for every young
person just starting to find what it means to create their own
sense of personhood and a collection revolutionary for every adult
who has already done so and never had the language to explain what
it felt like.”—Joanna Acevedo, GASHER Journal“There is such an
electricity to the lyric of Lenapehoking/Brooklyn-based poet and
performer imogen xtian smith’s full-length debut, stemmy things.
[...] Through a book-length lyric, smith writes an extended
sequence of sharp moments across narrative thought, one deeply
engaged with numerous threads, all of which wrap in and around
identity, self and gender.”—rob mclennan's blog
“In imogen xtian smith’s poetic imaginary, tears are phrased as
genders. In other words, we can only hurt ourselves into reliable
languaging. After all, I’ve never known a queer who didn’t—in
mulling over the body’s horrific (and ecstatic) illegibility—find
themself embroiled in the hellish, scrambling landscape of the
word. As transsexual babes, then, we issue forth as alien
encounters, both in embodied life and on the page. And so, stemmy
things is that alien encounter. This collection is a velvet-draped
gift, a study of queer morphology, a little gay edge. In poem after
poem, smith lovingly mirrors back our impossible trans
darkness.”—Anaïs Duplan“A fever dream of desire, trans/formation,
and becoming. A reckoning of histories collapsing into the sweaty,
sweet, peripatetic body of a poet who’s ready to talk about now.
Smith’s stemmy things is for the mis-recognized and misunderstood,
a guidebook of grounded and fertile imagination for the rigors of
accountability and feeling. It is beautifully perverse self-care,
wellness kink for girl they/thems. I argued with this book, cried
with it, wrapped myself in its affirming queerness. It’s a living
thing.”—Miguel Gutierrez“stemmy things is for lovers: lovers of
poetry and its history as a renegade art form, a queer go-to for
the centuries. Reading imogen xtian smith deepens my belief that
there are old souls — even Orlandos among us. I’m thinking of
Woolf’s proposition that poetry is a secret transaction, a voice
answering a voice. In imogen’s work, secrets are broadcast into the
realm of the civic, where voices answer voices multitudinously,
loving secrets and gossip but not so romantically as to accept the
loneliness of staying underground. There is something about their
sense of language that is so innovative, so curious, it feels
unprecedented to me. Add to this, they are devoted to recording
their queer trans femme life and times during late capitalism. I’m
grateful for this record, this book, and to share time and space
with this poet.”—Stacy Szymaszek“I’ve read many of these brilliant
poems half a dozen times now and still find some unexpected
texture, some slippery new layer at every turn. The magnificent
imogen xtian smith sticks tongues and fingers in earholes, pigeon
holes, rabbit holes, pillage holes— any holes that need feeling.
These poems fill our vacancies with company, they fill our hollows
with music. stemmy things is a verdant, fervid, worldly debut. It
fills me with words. It fills me with feeling. It’s
extraordinary.”—Terrance Hayes
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