The Transfeminine Review

Happy shortlist day! That’s right, today I’m going to be publishing no fewer than five shortlists for the marquee categories of the 2024 TFR Reader’s Choice Awards, as voted on by you, the readers. That’s a tall order (and I have to travel tomorrow), so I’m not going to be lingering as much on each individual book. Voting won’t close until 11:59pm EST on December 27th, so you’ve still got plenty of time to add your voice to the conversation.

Books will be ordered alphabetically by author’s last name in order to reduce bias to the greatest extent possible. I will be including only information found in publicly available marketing and publishing materials. Remember that every book on this list was nominated by the readers, and you can still vote for any book! If you want to see one of these books win the award, or think that a poetry collection not listed here deserves recognition, then make sure to vote in the link at the bottom of the article ❤

Without further ado, here are the seven contenders for the Best Transfeminine Poetry of 2024 award!

1. The Shortlist
   1. Desecrated Poppies – Yaffa As
   2. Poème dégénéré – Névé Dumas
   3. I Don’t Want to Be Understood – Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
   4. DEED – torrin a. greathouse
   5. & Glee and Bless – Petero Kalulé (petals)
   6. She Who Eats Tourists – Atalaya Magdalena
   7. Transgenesis – Ava Nathaniel Winter

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The Shortlist

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Currently, there are 557 anti-trans bills across 42 states, along with 45 national bills aiming to block trans people from any and all human rights. Additionally, there are 293 anti-Palestinian bills. These bills share many commonalities; they impact far more people than just the targeted identities listed on them and are crafted by the same individuals. They collectively propel us towards fascism. The same trend can be observed with cop cities, anti-abortion bills, and numerous other initiatives propelled forward by white Christian nationalists.

Desecrated Poppies, written during the eclipse in April 2024 and in anticipation of the November 2024 elections, delves into the intersections of anti-trans and anti-Palestine politics, illustrating how they intertwine with fascism. Through essays and poetry, Yaffa navigates their experiences of these seemingly conflicting identities, both of which are weaponized to advance fascism. Desecrated Poppies also explores antidotes to fascism, with a particular focus on cultural work and the imperative to prioritize the most marginalized among us. A world beyond fascism exists, and we hold the pathway forward.

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névé dumas écrit une poésie ancrée dans une profonde éthique de la relation. Elle invente un langage qui traverse les identités, les transcende sans pour autant les nier.

Elle utilise pour cela une langue (la langue, le plus long muscle du corps) sensuelle et vorace, incarnée, douée d’une pulsion vitale très forte, et ouvre des mondes densément peuplés qui s’attachent à troubler, en une dévoration lente, le rapport colonial au territoire. La dégénérescence est proposée alors comme condition de la possibilité d’être au monde, la transféminité des rivières, comme le lieu où « l’amitié conspire avec le territoire ».

Ce recueil envoûtant poursuit le travail de compostage du précédent livre de névé, pourritures terrestres, paru chez L’Oie de Cravan à l’automne 2020.

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A transsexual woman pieces together fragmented details of a repressive religious childhood and an unsupportive family, drawing from autobiographical experiences of the poet’s life.

I Don’t Want To Be Understood is a work of resistance against the conventional trans narrative, and a resistance against the idea that trans people should have to make themselves clear and understandable to others in other to deserve human rights. This is a compelling, urgent collection about the body and survival that asks how we learn to love in a culture where normal is defined by exclusion and discrimination.

These poems stretch from childhood to the present day—resisting typical narratives of self-discovery, resilience, and personal growth—and instead asks what it means to be granted or denied personhood by the world around you. It is a personal archive of a trans life laid out in all its messiness and unknowability, and is a book for anyone who has questioned why we place so many limitations on who gets to be considered a human being. These poems do not celebrate survival, but rather ask why transsexuals and other gender non-conforming people must fight so hard to survive in the first place.

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A lyrically and formally innovative exploration of desire and its cost

DEED, the follow-up to torrin a. greathouse’s 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award winning debut, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, is a formally and lyrically innovative exploration of queer sex and desire, and what it can cost. Sprawling across art, eros, survival, myth, etymology, and musical touchstones from Bruce Springsteen to Against Me!, this new book both subverts and pays homage to the poetic canon, examining an artistic lineage that doesn’t always love trans or disabled people back. Written in a broad range of received and invented forms—from caudate sonnets and the sestina, to acrostics and the burning haibun—DEED indicts violent systems of carceral, medical, and legal power which disrupt queer and disabled love and solidarity, as well as the potentially vicarious manner in which audiences consume art. This collection is a poetic triptych centered on the question of how, in spite of all these complications, to write an honest poem about desire. At its core, DEED is a reminder of how tenderness can be made a shield, a weapon, or a kind of faith, depending on the mouth that holds it.

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This little book gathers the things I love and cherish. It’s my most “personal” book yet, which is a way of saying that it is a book about the people I love (and want to love) and how I try (and often fail) to love them. Play, pleasure, silliness, grief, simplicity, and attentiveness guide my writing. The title ‘& glee and bless’ comes from a poem previously published for bath magg at the request of my friend Gboyega Odubanjo. I hope you love this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. 

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“I wrote She Who Eats Tourists when traveling, via scholarships and favors, between the US Southwest, Midwest, and East Coast. I was looking for something that I didn’t realize at the time was my girlhood, and I missed my home. Because of the direction I traveled, I felt the eyes of a white tourist, superimposed into in my own, reversed back to the East, where the settler colonial imagination has mostly strongly emanated, and irradiated since the dawn of Westward Expansion. I needed to understand what those eyes had done to me. This poetry collection is essentially various attempts to write one kind of poem, a poem that will feel, as a consolation, like justice to read.”

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An excavatory collection of poems tracing the connections between Jewish transfemininity, queer desire, and cultural histories.

Selected by Sean Hill for the National Poetry Series, this collection is a scrupulous chronicle of individual and cultural knowledge. In an exceptional debut, Ava Nathaniel Winter challenges our concepts of the beautiful and the sacred, delving not only into the historically marginalized, but also into the chilling subconscious of supremacy. “Let me be clear / from this beginning,” she writes, “What I mean by beauty / is a terror I have fled from / into language.”

Winter writes with a documentarian’s attention, a poet’s resonance. “I’m trying,” she admits, “to find language for what we do / to one another.” From Łódź, Poland, to predominantly white suburban America, from the space shared by queer lovers to antique cabinets filled with Nazi memorabilia, from Talmudic depictions of genderqueer rabbis to archival lynching photos, she regards the tender and the difficult with equal gravity, commemorating the fraught gift of survival.

At the heart of this collection—despite its moments of profound darkness—is a new, hard-won holiness. The “earthy aroma of rye” calling up a mother’s baking, her mother’s, hers. Belief in a lover’s lavishing. A chosen future, one where we are “reader, sibling, sister.” If Transgenesis began in fear of beauty, where it lands is this: “turning at last / to face her.”

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And that’s the shortlist! The Transfeminine Review isn’t on Instagram (Meta, bleh) which seems to be where the trans poetry community is located, so if people want to head over there and shout out all of the fantastic poets, that would be amazing.

Voting is still open! Vote by December 27th at 11:59 EST – there are thirty-four categories, so plenty of room to recognize the best transfeminine literature of the year beyond the discipline of poetry. Vote for as many or as few categories as you want, and remember, you can vote for any book, not just the ones listed here. Link below:

The nonfiction shortlist is next up on the docket :)) See you again in a bit.