The world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.ġ) Three months before he was born the Romanian dictator and his wife were executed before a firing squad. In a vivid hiss heard only by your bones.Ĭurriculum Vitae by Norman Erikson Pasaribu, translated by Tiffany Tsao Rolling up the beach walls, looking for light.Īnd spend the rest of its time inside you Vertebrae or fetters? Bedsheet or slave skin? Or the sour sinew yoking front and hind fin? You kick the weeds and try to piece it back.įractured shell? A bone? Bloated antennae?įlesh thigh spindle, gangrenous pet fish?Īn eye or a tiny glaring stone? A seal’s tongue? This book is a celebration of exuberant queer poetics, and it’s already very special because of that.” Pasaribu though, said the last thing they’d do is worry “about how hetero people see me or my writing. Giles said it’s always “grand to be in something that’s doing this sort of survey of work … that’s trying to, I suppose, use anthologising to communicate something broader” about who is writing poetry, and why. They hope that people reading the book will “understand that queerness is not a discrete sexual category separate from everything else, but something that changes colour and texture in relation to history, economics, nationhood, geography”. The power of the anthology, said Bernard, is that it “showcases each poem and poet doing something interesting with the subject in their historical context”. The poem, he says, is about rituals, what it means to be naked in front of others, and what we “tell ourselves when we see our body naked”. The poem’s title refers to a prefecture in Japan that contains geothermal hot springs, which Fan has visited. “And of course it is about the body and it is about how we experience ourselves being naked.” “It’s not directly queer or about sexuality, but when they chose it, it immediately gave me a sense of epiphany,” said Fan.
Meanwhile, Fan was surprised when Chan and McMillan chose his poem Hokkaido for the book, but says when he thought about it, it made sense. The poem asks a number of questions, says Bernard: “What has passed away and what will transpire? Can we allow for a radical inner transformation that appears ugly to us, or that might render us undesirable?” This book is a celebration of exuberant queer poetics, and it’s very special because of that Norman Erikson Pasaribu Meanwhile Bernard’s poem Hiss came about because they were “thinking about all of the burned buildings have seen or entered, how it feels to stand upright below an uncertain roof, how such buildings appear as both inside and outside, as both ruin and vitrine”. “And for me, poetry is a space where I can kind of talk out the experience of that.” “I’m somebody that leads a very political life and has been very involved in activist movements for a long time,” they said. Harry Josephine Giles’ poem May a transsexual hear a bird? touches on how their life is politicised. The anthology is split into various sections, covering everything from domesticity and history to the city and nature. So I thought it would be fun to be naughty about it by employing a tauntingly autobiographical title, a curriculum vitae.” “When I was starting publishing my writing, people would focus on the things they considered autobiographical and talk about them as if they were the weakness of my writing. “Based on my personal experience here, the literary communities are often allergic to anything autobiographical,” said Pasaribu, whose short story collection Happy Stories, Mostly, translated by Tiffany Tsao, was longlisted for this year’s International Booker prize. Mary Jean Chan with the Costa-winning collection Flèche. Norman Erikson Pasaribu, whose poem Curriculum Vitae is in the book, said it was “dreamlike” to be able to work with McMillan and Chan, and that they felt moved to have space given to “my voice, to my little poem”. McMillan and Chan are both acclaimed poets themselves – McMillan has won the Guardian first book award, the Somerset Maugham award and the Polari prize for his work, while Chan’s debut collection Flèche won the 2019 Costa poetry award. They added: “It will be interesting to see what poets today capture of this moment and how things shift in 10 or 20 years.” Jay Bernard, whose first poetry collection Surge was based on the New Cross fire archives and won the Ted Hughes award, said 100 Queer Poems was “coming at a critical, contradictory juncture: widespread hatred and distrust of trans people alongside huge efforts at representation and inclusion general acceptance of cis gay and bisexual people yet rising intolerance post-Brexit an increasingly vocal and visible intersex population, yet few legal rights or protections for them”.