“A story swallows its first words,” torrin a. greathouse writes, “forgets where it is going.” In the trans poet’s debut full-length collection, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, to be published December 22, 2020 by Milkweed Editions, greathouse documents the violence at the intersections of gender, disability, and trauma as a way of reconciling her disparate identities. By weaving together memories of familial rejection and childhood violence with the present violence trans and disabled people experience on a daily basis, the poems force us to confront the depth of pain of two long-erased communities.
“Did you know how this slur [lame] feathered its way into language?” a question posed in the poem “That’s So Lame,” which is about how we are conditioned to off-handedly dehumanize one another and ourselves. “By way of lame duck, whose own wings sever it from the flock & make it perfect prey... How long have you been naming us by our dead?”
Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a tremendous contribution to an emerging trans and queer poetics that is complicating language and the canon in order to reflect an equally complex human experience of beauty and erasure. greathouse is a precise, miraculous surgeon with language who sews together a deep gash in our body politic and poetic imagination.
In an email interview, I talked with torrin about Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, where they explained the importance of the mythic in their work, her relationship to the canon, and the future of queer literature.
Angel Gonzales: The book’s first poem, “Medusa with the Head of Perseus,” is such a powerful opening to the collection, and it’s also an ekphrasis poem on the sculpture that’s featured on the cover by Luciano Garbati. How did discovering this sculpture evolve the writing of the book?
torrin a. greathouse: In a way, Garbati’s sculpture of Medusa mothered the collection as it exists now. The book’s title, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, is of course drawn from this ekphrasis but, on a more structural level, this poem set the conditions for collection. It formed a mythology of transness, of cyclical violence, of mental illness, and of the body in its breaking. With this poem as a starting point, I was able to restructure the entire book around this constellation of themes, knowing the reader would have an anchor, a vantage point.
I also just want to briefly shout out Cael Lyons, who created the cover art based on Garbati’s sculpture. He’s an incredible artist and was really able to capture the vision I had while integrating so many small nods to the images that occur throughout the collection. I genuinely couldn’t imagine my book without this cover.
AG: You’ve said Wound from the Mouth of a Wound “attempts to reconcile the disparate identities” you hold, and the poems speak beautifully and devastatingly to your experiences with anti-trans violence, erasure, and trauma — despite the fact you’re writing within a canon that doesn’t have language or structures for these experiences. How would you describe the relationship between the processes of reconciliation and writing? How do you know when you have found the right or accurate language for your experiences and identities?
tag: I have a complicated relationship with the “canon.” How could I not? So much of the poetic canon has not only excluded but been openly hostile to trans and disabled poets. Every single day, I see poets I love on Twitter sharing and celebrating the work of people who do not see, or would not have seen, me as human. But many of the poets I love dearly write from this complex position, a relationship to, and subversion of, the standards of a “canon” that would never allow them quarter.
It was in navigating this complex discomfort that I reached the book’s negotiated meeting point of narrative, lyrical, and experimental modes; a hybrid of approaches that has acted as a valuable meeting point to perform this reconciliation. I was interested in — to borrow a phrase from Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability — formally exploring the “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning” that sit at the interstice of my multiple identities.
In all honesty, I’m never entirely sure I have found the accurate language for my identities, a factor of the endlessness of medical diagnosis and the fluid nature of gender, expression, and sexuality. On the other hand, I often know — or think I know — that I have found the right language for relating an experience when the act of speaking a poem out loud makes me shake. Some of these poems were still changing right up to the point the ARCs printed. Others though, have not changed. Those are the poems I can barely read sometimes, the poems that run through my veins like boiling water.
AG: I love the way your poems challenge language structures, both poetic and societal, by crossing out the word “disabled” and italicizing “biological female” and “dysphoria.” What does the act of challenging the language we inherit mean for trans poetics and writers with disabilities? Do you think this query can help trans communities imagine trans futures?
tag: In this collection, I was deeply invested in questioning and deconstructing the ways that bodies like mine are pathologized and infantilized to remove our agency. These textual modes are meant to both call attention to and subvert the linguistic presence of the medical-industrial complex, to make clear who is doing the speaking in these moments.
The italicization of the terms you noted, as well as the exploration of gender identity disorder as an archaic terminology in “When My Gender is First Named Disorder,” are meant to prod at the lingering bioessentialism and stigma associated with transness in the medical field as a former “psychiatric disorder.” The striking through of “disabled” is a tongue-in-cheek nod toward the way in which doctors’ refusal to speak the word disabled, and replacement of it with euphemisms like dis/abled, handicapable, otherwise abled, or people with disabilities, acts to obliterate disability as a cogent category of identity.
While I do not believe we can stake our futurity on language alone — or that we can assume a person’s conformity to trans-affirming language forestalls their potential for transphobia and violence — I do believe that it is a tool for both unsettling the limited lexicon we are given, and for constructing new worlds. My trans and disabled selfhood was, after all, impossible to embody before I could name it in language that belonged to me. And this is why my work must be wary of the ways in which institutions seek to construct language around us that we did not choose, to name us out of ourselves.
AG: A lot of the poems start with “once” and I read that as a rewriting of fairytales that begin with “once upon a time” because of the themes of Greek mythology, story, and the imagination. Why does engaging with the mythic in your work resonate with you?
tag: Absolutely! The recurring use of “once” in this collection is a gesture toward the languages of myth and fairytale, but also gesture toward a particular articulation of memory. In writing this collection, I was thinking a lot about the effects of trauma upon memory, how it can twist what was once linear into something cyclical and repetitive. Each “once” can, perhaps, be imagined as a new beginning or entry point into the mobius strip of cyclical traumatic time. It’s inescapable, but maybe that’s the function of the mythic? To imagine a way out, like Daedalus building his wings of wax. To recreate or reimagine the self, like “Medusa with the Head of Perseus.” To write a myth more survivable than the one you lived through.
AG: The book’s final poem, “Ars Poetica or Sonnet to be Written Across My Chest & Read in a Mirror, Beginning with a Line from Kimiko Hahn,” is a game-changing poem and a call to action, in a way. Why did you want the reader to interact with the poem by reading it in the mirror?
tag: This poem’s formal approach, the mirroring, came out of an urge to push back on two assertions that a professor — an old cis-het white man — made in my final year of undergrad, in one of the few creative writing courses I was able to take. First, that a writer’s identities should not be considered when analyzing their work. Second, that the form of a poem on the page was largely meaningless. We were allowed to turn in only a single poem for this course, our final, and so I wrote this poem — then read it aloud to the class using a hand mirror.
My process of both reading and writing poems has always been a profoundly embodied one, and this poem demands that relationship be pushed even further. It is a poem I cannot read without pressing the poem to my own heart and rattling it with my pulse. I wanted this poem’s form within the book to invite readers into an embodied process alongside me, but also to challenge a cis, abled, reader to consider their own body as they read. There is also, of course, a certain destabilization in placing this poem after all that comes before. When I say that I am still alive, the poem so closely tied to my body, this carries the clear implication of despite, of for now.
AG: In 2018, the VIDA Count reported that Poetry, a journal where you’re a frequent contributor, published 47% women and 9% non-binary writers, the highest percentage of the next fourteen journals combined. In 2017 you started Black Napkin Press with a commitment to “disrupt the heteronormative white-cis-male-centric publishing industry,” publishing great poets like Dave Harris and Jasper Wirtshafter. What do you think are the barriers that prevent trans and non-binary writers from having more space? What changes in queer and trans writing do you hope to see in the future?
tag: The biggest barriers are probably that no one will hire us, and that most of us are poor. It’s hard to keep a magazine or book press running when you have no damn money and are working multiple jobs to survive. Black Napkin was a sadly short-lived, and in some ways flawed, project. We actually began the project in 2016, and closed doors in mid-2018, after the rest of the staff had become too overwhelmed to continue and I had been running the operation alone for three months. I was doing this on top of two part-time jobs, freelance copy editing, and attending school full-time.
When I think of an ideal future, for one, I would love to see publishing houses making public statistics on the diversity of their catalog. How many trans people are they publishing? How many are nonbinary? How many are trans men, how many trans women? How many are trans people of color? How many of these authors are Black? How many are Indigenous? How many books that sit outside of the cis-accessible transition narrative are they publishing? Really, the dream is to have more trans people in editorial positions. I want more trans people being retained, rather than being mistreated as interns and leaving the industry. I want more trans people making good money. Really, I just want to see a long-running prestigious single judge poetry series, like Yale Younger Poets or the Pitt Poetry Series, taken over by a trans judge.
torrin a. greathouse is a trans poet, cripple-punk, and MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. Her work is published in Ploughshares, New England Review, TriQuarterly, and The Kenyon Review. She is the author of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020).
Angel Gonzales is a trans writer from Fresno, California. Her work as appeared on Poets.org, The Normal School, and Crab Orchard Review. You can follow her @angelgonzalesfs on Twitter.