Ms Saffaa | MilkMan | 2013
TRANSQUEER Editorial: Stuart Barnes and Quinn Eades
Artwork:
14 Works by Ms Saffaa
Essays:
The Kindness of Strangers: On New Zealand’s Literary Journals by Louise Wallace
Translations:
Three Translated Xhevdet Bajraj Poems by Alice Whitmore
Four Translated Ángelo Néstore Poems by Lawrence Schimel
Interviews:
‘There is nothing more shared than language’: Carolyn DeCarlo Interviews Gregory Kan
‘Language can multiply itself and form secret and unusual patterns’: Andrew Pascoe Interviews Ania Walwicz
Reviews:
Joan Fleming Reviews Fiona Hile and Luke Beesley
Owen Bullock Reviews Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Winnie Siulolovao Dunn Reviews Tayi Tibble
Film:
It Is Happening Again and Holding Pattern by Ross Gibson and Chris Abrahams
When we put out the call for TRANSQUEER we asked poets ‘to explore trans identities not as positions to defend but as modes of becoming and thus ways of being human’ (Joy Ladin, Trans Studies Quarterly, 2016: 640) and ‘to believe that the world is QUEER, or that oneself is, or both, [and that this] is a window of doubt through which all creative possibility comes into being’ (Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word).
Ken Bolton’s thinking is never too relaxed, but moves restlessly and anxiously, across people, cultural references and disparate locations even as he writes, or so it appears. And the resultant poems also seem to be unfiltered by any desire on the poet’s part to be ‘poetic’.
Gregory Kan is a New Zealand poet and arts writer currently living in Wellington. He received an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) at Victoria University in 2012, and was awarded the 2017 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship, during which he held a six-month tenure at the Sargeson Centre in Auckland.
Yet, as literary theory in the intervening decades has shown, no individual can speak for the collective per se, bound as they are by the confines of their culture, gender, race, class, as well as the inherently constructed nature of that self that defines lyric poetry (which, as Maria Takolander has recently argued, is in turn bound by the technology that writes it).
