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In her debut collection, TRANZ, Spencer Williams writes equally riotous and vulnerable poems, penning a love letter to trans people and their audacity to exist in a world that constantly endangers them structurally and individually. Her blistering lyrics and acerbic wit never flatten her subjects but rather filet normative hypocrisy to reveal unspoken truths. Williams observes, “i am not dangerous until i’m made in the mouth / of someone who fears me,” and remembers receiving apologies whose “guilty resonance burns / like a wet willy from god.” She articulates a vast landscape of physical and ideological violence against trans people by illuminating this fundamental paradox: “i can’t fear u less until u fear me less—.” And yet the radical poetics of TRANZ is a celebratory self-becoming. Because of Williams’ subversive genius and lyrical grace, every indictment is also a declaration of triumph, a reminder that the ever-dynamic trans community continues to thrive despite, not through, its opposition to an antagonistic cultural discourse. In every place, in every time, trans people are enduring. Extant. “on the milk carton. on the public access / television. everywhere i go i am there so brutally.” 

Spencer Williams is a trans writer from Chula Vista, California. She is the author of the chapbook Alien Pink (The Atlas Review, 2017) and her work has been featured in Literary Hub, Indiewire, and Polygon, among others. She received her MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark, and is currently a PhD student in poetics at SUNY, Buffalo.