We Are Mermaids
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Effusive new poems by Stephanie Burt, “perhaps our greatest poet of having yet more to say” (Boston Review)
Stephanie Burt’s poems in We Are Mermaids are never just one thing. Instead, they revel in their multiplicity, their interconnectedness, their secret powers to become much more than they at first seem. In these poems, punctuation marks make arguments for their utility and their rights to exist. Frozen isn’t simply another Disney animated musical but “the Most Trans Movie Ever.” Mermaids, werewolves, and superheroes don’t just fret over divided natures and secret identities, but celebrate their wholeness, their unique abilities, and their erotic potential. Flowers in this collection bloom into exactly what they are meant to be—revealing themselves, like bleeding hearts, beyond their given names.
With humor and insight, Burt’s poems have always cherished and examined the things of this world, both real and imagined objects of fascination and desire. In this resplendent new collection, her observation and care flourish into her most fulfilled book yet. These poems shake off indecisiveness and doubt to reach joys through romance and family, through nature (urban and otherwise), and through imaginative community. We Are Mermaids is a trans book, a fangirl book, a book about coming together. It’s also Burt’s best book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Burt (After Callimachus) explores pop culture, myth, and flora and fauna in her latest, a layered reflection on identity. In "Cabbage Whites," which, like many of these poems, reflects on the trans experience, the speaker is a butterfly addressing others who have emerged from their states as caterpillars, who "were meant to be left and could be left/ amid our claque of leaves, each on our own," but once transformed, "No danger, no inclement/ weather, no stalking or/ aerial predator/ can make us choose to live that way again." In "At the Parkway Deli," Burt describes childhood trips to a Jewish deli where she was drawn to the "world-famous pick-your-own-pickle bar." Evocative descriptions include "green sour tomatoes that pop/ whenever you cut or bite into them,/ intricate as a satellite inside;/ sauerkraut in three colors, like some nation's flag/ left outdoors in a storm and shredded," and the poem ends with the poet reflecting on how these visits foreshadowed the salt cravings common among women undergoing hormone replacement therapy ("You can know what you need/ before you know why"). In "Cinderella," Burt remixes the fairy tale, "The trans story is the heroine has to be trans/ because nobody else in the capital shares/ her size." Burt's imagination is rendered in mellifluous, energetic language in this memorable book.
