day/break

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. DAY/BREAK, poet Gwen Benaway's fourth collection of work, explores the everyday poetics of the trans feminine body. Through intimate experiences and conceptualizations of trans life, DAY/BREAK asks what it means to be a trans woman, both within the text and out in the physical world. Shifting between theory and poetry, Benaway questions how gender, sexuality, and love intersect with the violence and transmisogyny of the nation state and established literary institutions. In beautiful lyric verse, DAY/BREAK reveals the often-unseen other worlds of trans life, where body, self, and sex are transformed, becoming more than fixed binary locations.

"Gwen Benaway is quickly becoming a master poet. Four books in and blowing all of our minds, but I really think she's just getting warmed up. I wanted to write something brilliant to recommend DAY/BREAK, but I can think of nothing better than Gwen's own words: 'we will not say love / knowing enough / of grief / to speak / truer words.'"--Katherena Vermette

"What vision, what musicality! This astounding and brilliant examination of love and its discontents reminds me of Anne Carson's theory that love turns us into anthropologists of our own lives. From Benaway's DAY/BREAK (her best book yet), we might learn how to democratize love's liberatory possibilities. How lucky are we to be reading in the time of Gwen Benaway!"--Billy-Ray Belcourt