“Being a man, like being a woman, is something you have to learn,” Aaron Raz Link remarks. Few would know this better than the coauthor of What Becomes You, who began life as a girl named Sarah and twenty-nine years later began life anew as a gay man. Turning from female to male and from teaching scientist to theatre performer, Link documents the extraordinary medical, social, legal, and personal process involved in a complete identity change. Hilda Raz, a well-known feminist writer and teacher, observes the process as both an “astonished” parent and as a professor who has studied gender issues. All these perspectives come into play in this collaborative memoir, which travels between women’s experience and men’s lives, explores the art and science of changing sex, maps uncharted family values, and journeys through a world transformed by surgery, hormones, love, and . . . clown school. Combining personal experience and critical analysis, the book is an unusual—and unusually fascinating—reflection on gender, sex, and the art of living.

What Becomes You (American Lives)

Politics & Social Sciences

Raz, Hilda

Link, Aaron Raz

Social Sciences

University Of Nebraska Press

“Being a man, like being a woman, is something you have to learn,” Aaron Raz Link remarks. Few would know this better than the coauthor of What Becomes You, who began life as a girl named Sarah and twenty-nine years later began life anew as a gay man. As he transforms from female to male and from teaching scientist to theatre performer, Link documents the extraordinary medical, social, legal, and personal processes involved in a complete identity change. Hilda Raz, a well-known feminist writer and teacher, observes this process both as an “astonished” parent and as a professor who has studied gender issues. All these perspectives come into play in this collaborative memoir, which travels between women’s experiences and men’s lives, explores the art and science of changing sex, maps uncharted family values, and journeys through a world transformed by surgery, hormones, love, and . . . clown school. Combining personal experience and critical analysis, the book is an unusual—and unusually fascinating—reflection on gender, sex, and the art of living. This Bison Books edition features a set of discussion questions.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Bison Books

In What Happens readers will find two separate books by poet Hilda Raz, originally published as The Bone Dish and What Is Good, brought together for the first time as the author intended. These musically wrought and emotionally candid poems explore the pleasure and pain of family relationships, the complicated joy of being a woman, and the unconventional beauty of the Great Plains. Readers will meet Raz’s son, Aaron, and find themselves drawn to fundamental questions about identity and belonging.

What Happens

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Divine Honors (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Wesleyan University Press

Winner of the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry (2002) This elegant and moving collection documents Hilda Raz's experience with breast cancer. The journey, from diagnosis to chemotherapy to mastectomy, from denial to humor to grief and rage, is ultimately one of courage and creativity. The poems themselves are accessible and finely wrought. They are equally testaments to Raz's insistence on making an order out of chaos, of finding ways to create and understand and eventually accept new definitions of good and evil, health, blame, personal boundaries ― in short, a new sense of self. These poems remain intimately bound to the world and of the senses, becoming documents of transformation.

Diseases & Physical Ailments

Trans (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Winner of the Nebraska Center for the Book's Nebraska Book Award for poetry (2002) This elegant and moving collection grew out of Hilda Raz's experience with her son's journey to a transgender identity. Born Sarah, now Aaron, Raz's child has had a profound impact on her understanding of what it means to be a family, to be whole, and to know oneself. The collection moves between past and present, allowing Raz to reflect on her own childhood, and on her experience with breast cancer to find ways to connect with Aaron. The journey takes us from intimacy to strangeness and back again, from denial to humor to grief and rage, but always laced with love and acceptance. "Trans" means across, through, over, to or on the other side, and beyond. The book documents some major transformations of body, self, society and spirit that art requires and life allows. The poems themselves are accessible and finely wrought. They are equally testaments to Raz's insistence on making an order out of chaos, of finding ways to create and understand and eventually accept new definitions of self and family. The physical and sensuous language of Raz's poems, and their humanity, keep them intimately bound to the world and to the senses.

Following her latest book, What Becomes You, a memoir co-written with her transgendered son Aaron, Hilda Raz's new collection of poems is an exploration of lives and selves transformed by choice and by chance. Formally and thematically diverse, these poems are testament to the will to redefine oneself in a world of constant, and often painful, change. Beginning intimately with poems of personal examination and moving gradually to the world of shared experience, Raz rethinks the structures of family and community while examining the impact of loss and growth. All Odd and Splendid takes its title from a quotation attributed to Diane Arbus, the American photographer known for her portraits. Raz's poems share Arbus's steadfast celebration of the strangeness in the ordinary, bringing us into contact with a beauty and pain that are inseparable when we see things as they truly are.

All Odd and Splendid (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

In this powerful anthology of personal narratives, essays, shaped journals, and poems, eighteen women writers share their experiences with breast cancerfrom diagnosis and treatment, to aspects of marriage, motherhood, friendship, sexuality, work, and recurrence. Lucille Clifton, Carol Dine, Elaine Greene, Marilyn Hacker, Judith Hall, Safiya Henderson-Holmes, Annette Williams Jaffee, Maxine Kumin, Amy Ling, Claudia MonPere McIsaac, Carole Simmons Oles, Alicia Ostriker, Pamela Post, Hilda Raz, Mimi Schwartz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sandra Spanier (on Kay Boyle), and Janet Sternberg. Includes an interview with Dr. Susan Love.

Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer

Persea

Hilda Raz has an ability "to tell something every day and make it tough," says John Kinsella in his introduction. Letter from a Place I've Never Been shows readers the evolution of a powerful poet who is also one of the foremost literary editors in the country. Bringing together all seven of her poetry collections, a long out-of-print early chapbook, and her newest work, this collection delights readers with its empathetic and incisive look at the inner and outer lives we lead and the complexities that come with being human. Showcasing the work of a great American voice, Letter from a Place I've Never Been&nbsp;at last allows us to see the full scope and range of Raz's work.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Letter from a Place I've Never Been: New and Collected Poems, 1986–2020

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Raz, Hilda. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Raz, Hilda

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Raz, Hilda. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

What Becomes You (American Lives)

What Becomes You (American Lives)

What Happens

Divine Honors (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Divine Honors (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Trans (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Trans (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

All Odd and Splendid (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer

Letter from a Place I've Never Been: New and Collected Poems, 1986–2020