cover image TRANS

TRANS

Hilda Raz, . . Wesleyan Univ., $26 (108pp) ISBN 978-0-8195-6504-4

Raz's varied and serious new collection plays a range of styles while sticking closely to the poet's life. About half the volume describes Raz's troubled, but finally heartwarming, experience with her daughter "Sarah," who changed her sex to become Raz's adult son "Aaron." Other poems examine Raz's extended family—she is especially good on the very old (in a shocking poem set in a nursing home) and on maternity and childbirth. Raz (Divine Honors) has long taught English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where she edits the journal Prairie Schooner; some vivid verse describes the Nebraska landscape and its hardscrabble citizens. Whether she writes of Aaron or Sarah, funerals or fields, Raz's tone remains sincere and open: "Nothing to explain, no shield," she writes, "of paperthin skin between history and the untender world." Raz employs, among other devices, the hortatory intimacy of '70s confessionalism; the expansive verse-paragraphs of an Albert Goldbarth or a Deborah Digges; and a more disjunctive approach, often expressed in couplets or short prose poems. Many lines seem over-the-top; some are mawkish: "you, for all we've been through,/ are identical genetically to the daughter you were." Raz does better with terser, harsher verse, as in "Doing the Puzzle/Angry Voices," where "Every book that documents birth/ puts on to gender a meaning./ That piece of the junco tree is filled with sparrows." Always articulate and sometimes well-crafted, the volume relies too heavily on its subjects, yet its pleasures, like its concerns, are genuine. (Oct.)

Forecast:Raz's principal subject—her child's transsexualism—gives the book an obvious publicity angle, and perhaps a niche audience as well (not transgender people, but their families). Her longtime presence at Prairie Schooner, for which she has edited "Best of" anthologies, and her editorship of Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer (1999), have given her a solid reputation. Throw in a public radio appearance or glossy magazine mention, and the book could take off.