Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay

The complexities of a trans identity and contemplations of aquatic life provide the pulsating current to these ruminative essays. Horn, a British translator who was born female and identifies as “nonbinary, transmasculine,” revisits episodes of discontent and danger: a 1990s childhood marked by a loathing of girls’ clothing and toys; a confrontation with hostile Russian women in a swimming pool changing room; a terrifying attack in their adulthood by a stranger on the street; and a season of youthful malaise working as a kitchen hand in Belgium while battling podiatric warts that were miraculously cured by a folk healer. All this swirls around the question, “What might gender look like written beyond the blurring of a male-female binary?”—an inquiry that begets picaresque scientific and historical disquisitions on pike, sturgeon, and eels that change sex when they mature. “Noting these aquatic bodies” as a child, Horn writes, “helped dissolve a world I found too hard.” Gleaning resonant insights from the fishes’ mysteriously mutable existences, Horn offers fascinating piscine lore, rendered in prose that’s grounded and evocative even when hallucinatory (weathering a tropical storm, “I watched fish glide between car tyres, suck at weed caught in hubcaps, their bodies illuminated by the beam of car park floodlights”). The result is a sonorous meditation on living a fluid life. (June)