Metonymy Press is proud to release the Canadian edition of Trish Salah’s Lyric Sexology Vol. 1.
Michael V. Smith writes, “Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 makes a perfect mess of so much human experience that’s been too tidily categorized. It’s a finger flip to established notions of how a man or woman comes to be. Not dismissive, but irreverent. Not binary, but a new bi. Bi-everything. Buy into nothing, except your self in this moment. The poetry pours into a chilled glass, a long tall drink of all that’s gendered and sacred, sets the mixture on fire, and proffers us a big gulp. With this concoction, Lyric Sexology will unmake us, so we might begin again.”
The new version of Salah’s second collection of poetry, originally published in the US by Roof Books in 2014, features four additional poems, including “Tiresias as Cuir (on the run),” which first appeared in Vetch: A Magazine of Trans Poetry and Poetics in spring 2016.
Tiresias as Cuir (on the run)
i.
Dog. The time you take home, the time you take away from home.
The insistence, the instance worried at with your thick tongue.
Stink. Because of what you found on the ground and put in your gut.
Harry. As in beset, or beast. To beast on their terms, their territory.
Gut knotted, pulled and twined to an internal clock.
Drape over the occasion, sleep on the mat at the metre’s foot.
ii.
Cuir poetics or not, monolingual, but your poets are. Cure misery
not confined to the nation-state, but spread by road trip, hash, tragic opera.
Idle vials can be convincingly propped to suit the man you want
to be, or issue forward “the food that always remains” esteemed.
Cuir milieu you want to tableau. An apology for discovery, accident.
Scales already weighted, reviews in stone long buried time.
Mainstreaming “long buried time” sleeps draped in prophesy.
Root as per root. Ocean as per root. Sleep as per root.
iii.
On the couch. At the urinal. A woman, a race with a use value
For the revolution. For the dead. For women like me.
When the ocean is rooted, one criticizes, less guilty
Parting documentaries as love letters, cursive, sans serif.
Without documents, cur poetics root for, if not abstinence
Then the mainstreaming of prophesy and the dispute of Tiresias.
Part ocean, part dog, and nine parts of the nation state
A wight kills for pleasure and gold and land and slaves.
Tiresias was a wight and not a wight, queer speech
trafficking like vector surveillance, vile night unending.
iv.
The simplest equations are subtraction.
A “dog never loses its savour.” Arab slavers.
Fawn smear from the mouth, eye sockets
Tell me about your history, the one to come.
v.
Who invents virtues? Riddles? Laqueur races home.
—
Order your copy today.
—
Born in Halifax, Trish Salah is the author of Wanting in Arabic (TSAR 2002, 2013) and Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 (Roof 2014, Metonymy 2017) and co-editor of special issues of Canadian Review of American Studies 35.2 (2005) and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.4 (2014). The 2013 edition of Wanting in Arabic won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction. At the University of Winnipeg she organized the conferences Writing Trans Genres: Emergent Literatures and Criticism and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres. Currently an assistant professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, she is a member of the editorial boards of TSQ, Eoagh, and Topia.
