An Optimism

The introspective latest from Awkward-Rich (Dispatch) explores Black trans life in an era when possibilities that were so recently accessible appear increasingly tenuous. Many poems give shape to interior landscapes of thought and feeling: “Each morning,/ these days, I walk/ the path winding/ through the woods/ behind my chest, knowing/ what I’ll find but not/ what finding it again/ will change.” Elsewhere, the speaker reflects on Odo, the shape-shifting character from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, to describe the experience of being made to fit a mold: “we become what we/ are made to become, approximate/ the forms of those doctors,/ those mothers, those lonesome/ men, brute children who call us/ unmentionable names, who tell/ us, not always without kindness,/ what we are.” A long poem is addressed to Pauli Murray, the 20th-century civil rights activist and poet who suffered living at a time without the language or means to express her possible transgender identity: “we can sense... in your poems, your photographs, your strained sentences, your trans life preserved in the aesthetic, your still-latent futures given form.” These sensitive and expansive poems chart the journey toward ecstatic self-actualization. (Oct.)