Weekend Reading Recommendation: On International Transgender Day of Visibility, I wanted to highlight one of the finalists for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards for Transgender Poetry: Paul Tran’s All the Flowers Kneeling. It’s an intense and illuminating read, dealing with themes related to power, control, and trauma both generational and personal. You can hear Tran read their own poetry at the New Yorker, where they provided a reading of their poem Copernicus. Here are a few lines:
“Now I know what appears as the motion of Heaven is just the motion of Earth, not Stars, not whatever I want.”
Other finalists in the Lambda Literary Transgender Poetry category for this year include A Dead Name That Learned How to Live by Golden and A Queen in Bucks County by K. Gabriel. Happy reading and happy International Transgender Day of Visibility!