Anna James

“A World of Our Own” provides the first comprehensive account of trans poetry from its midcentury origins to the contemporary avant-garde. Combining pioneering archival research with detailed close-reading, this interdisciplinary study draws on feminist theory, American studies, and new lyric studies in order to situate trans poetics in relation to a wide range of print subcultures, discursive formations, literary forms, and social worlds. At its heart, “A World of Our Own” meditates on personhood: how trans writers past and present creatively contest exclusionary and reductive constructions of transness in popular media, institutional medicine, legal documents, academic theory, and everyday life by alternately embracing and torquing the expressive conventions of lyric poetry. The project ultimately illustrates that, despite its critical neglect, poetry is a vital cultural practice through which trans people have and continue to craft identity, build community, and perform politics.