In Transitory, her Isabella Gardner Award-winning fourth collection, queer poet Subhaga Crystal Bacon commemorates the 46 trans and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the United States and Puerto Rico in 2020--an "epidemic of violence" that coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic.
The book arose from a workshop Bacon (Blue Hunger) attended on writing "formal poems of social protest." Among the forms employed here are acrostics and erasures performed on news articles--ironically appropriate for reversing trans erasure. She devotes one elegy to each hate-crime victim, titling it with their name and age as well as the location and date of the killing, and sifting through key details of their life and death. Often, trans people are misgendered or deadnamed in prison, by ambulance staff, or after death, so a crucial element of the tributes is remembering them all by chosen name and gender.
The statistics Bacon conveys are heartbreaking: "The average life expectancy of a Black trans woman is 35 years of age"; "Half of Black trans women spend time in jail"; "Trans people are anywhere/ between eleven and forty percent/ of the homeless population." She also draws on her own experience of gender nonconformity: "A little butch./ A little femme." She recalls of visiting drag bars in the 1980s: "We were all/ trying on gender." And she vows: "No one can say a life is not right./ I have room for you in me." Her poetic memorial is a valuable exercise in empathy. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck