Notes on Female Visionary Poetry: Trans Women Poets Writing Themselves into Existence

Aviva Bogart, Inside God’s Body, 2020

If you turn to page 515 of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, co-edited by Trace Peterson and TC Tolbert and published by Nightboat in 2013, you’ll see a picture of me taken by my partner Britt. The setting is the old apartment we used to share with friends on Twenty-Second Street and Telegraph in Oakland, California, and there are books and art and an LP by The Men propped up cheekily in the background. There’s a little bit of the prophetic here, in that Britt teases out a softness I didn’t think anyone could see from my face which hadn’t yet been softened by hormones and the feeling of living in greater alignment with my gender. Across my collarbone, my name: Zoe Tuck, newly and somewhat aspirationally claimed at the time I was submitting these poems to Trace and TC. My closest encounter with the visionary or the prophetic in my own life was writing the poetry and poetic statement which this image accompanied. Read the rest at Ayin!