THIS EVENT IS CANCELLED DUE TO UNAVOIDABLE CIRCUMSTANCES — we hope to reschedule in the future.
Grounded in protest and solidarity, Subhaga Crystal Bacon’s Isabella Gardner Award-winning Transitory is a collection of elegies memorializing 46 transgender and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the US and Puerto Rico in 2020. Subhaga joins us to read from Transitory, accompanied by local poet C.L. Liedekev. To reserve your copy of Subhaga’s book for this event, use the ADD TO CART button below.
Epistolary in nature, the commemorative poems in Transitory are “gleaned sketches” attempting to reconstruct lives and deaths from the typically scarce information made available on the internet. Interspersed with the elegies are personal explorations of gender identities and sexualities from a Queer elder who has lived through the post-Stonewall years of sexual liberation, the second wave of feminism, and the recent rapid increases in awareness about gender and sexualities met almost equally with anti-trans and anti-Queer violence.
Seen through the lenses of whiteness and privilege from the last quarter of a lifetime, these poems navigate the desire to be at home in our bodies, to be loved and desired without danger, and most of all to live free, healthy, and welcome in the world we inhabit.
Subhaga Crystal Bacon is a Queer poet living in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land. She is the author of four collections of poetry. Her latest book, Transitory, is the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry and was listed in the Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 50 Books of 2023.
C.L. Liedekev is a New Jersey expatriate living in Conshohocken, PA, with his real name, wife, and children. He is a two-time nominee for Best of the Net, with his poem "November Snow. Philadelphia Children's Hospital" being a finalist in 2021. His poem “The Hungry” was a 2023 Inaugural Plentitudes Prize finalist. His work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Humana Obscura, Red Fez, River Heron Review, Marrow, American Writers Review, In Parentheses, Bindweed Magazine, Feral, Hare's Paw, Alien Buddha, Poppy Road Review, Tiny Seed, and The Schuylkill Valley Journal, amongst many others.