stemmy things by imogen xtian smith

stemmy things by imogen xtian smith

Nightboat Books 2022

I’m not sure where I first encountered imogen xtian smith’s work, but it was my pleasure to publish some of it in Hot Pink, the journal Emily Brown and I coedit. The first stanzas of smith’s poem in that issue, “Collector,” might be a good way into thinking about their book stemmy things:

Writing poems is somatic play ({}{}
-{}{}). i rap at my limits & it’s not always

pretty. Words, thrust beyond event
horizon. Hands beg questions…

There’s a manifesto here, or at least a couple of working principles. smith writes from the edges of their body: soft, hard, and slimy. What’s being caressed isn’t just the self or the sexual object—the feeling edge of their body addresses the whole fraught fecund world.

stemmy things begins with an author’s note:

Poetry both is & is not a luxury. Everything depends
on context. i, the author, am a white, trans, neurodivergent
person born on stolen land. i am a
worker, as well as beneficiary, of academic & institutional
assistance. As such, my privileges—invisible, visible
& ever emergent in my consciousness—
have shaped the proceeding pages. My intention
has been to trouble the worlds in which i move,
support, fail, live, struggle, love & continue trans-ing,
addressing with rigor the circumstances
that continuously shape me.

“Poetry both is & is not a luxury” is of course in conversation with Audre Lorde’s 1985 “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” For Lorde, “[Poetry] is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” smith takes the bothness of dream and action Lorde advocates as their credo.

Lorde is also one of many authors with whom smith converses. Another delight in this collection is the referentiality and/as sociality. Everyone’s in the room, from Etel Adnan to K, the Berliner cabby. Each section begins with two epigraphs. For example, “field jar” starts with epigraphs from Walter Benjamin and Wanda Coleman, “life trance hacks mourning sound,” with Amanda Monti and Larry Mitchell.

smith roams around in this book, unsatisfied with rote or pat or partial political engagement. Carrying around Hannah Arendt is not enough. From “year of the rat”:

The year chimes with a fury others will match. January—slash & burn raging, the topsoil a foundate for smolder. The world’s all cinder & i get lit too, become one of those concerned citizens you see reading Hannah Arendt on the train—no shame, but it is a specific mood, a demographic kind of thing, speaks to class, privilege, white, as in we’ve hardly seen the beginning of demagoguery, didn’t ya know? Performative outrage notwithstanding.

This has, what I assume is the intended effect: to introduce friction into left political self-satisfaction. But smith themself (/their poetic avatar) also lives and writes into the not-enough-ness, conceding (insisting? celebrating?) that, “Even in these times a person can be happy you know.”

My path into this beautifully bottom-y book was lubricated by its mellifluousness. Take the opening of the opening poem, “open letter utopia”:

Linger with me here, from the beginning—we know not
each other’s suffering, our specific subjugations. Every I after all,
born bloody, post-dilation, birth dowse, loosed bowel, slip. Tell me,
who mothered you, bore your softness, bathed your limbs?

What pleasure in in the sibilance of esses and us (suffering…subjugations)! The alliteration continues in the third line with a barrage of bees. smith’s poetry is sparged with assonance and internal rhyme.

stemmy things is thick for a poetry book: 143 pages from the first poem to the bio. As someone with a thick poetry book coming out herself, I found it validating. Plus, stemmy things has endnotes (Bedroom Vowel also has endnotes). I go to log my reading on Goodreads, peep other reviews accusing stemmy things of being too long, needing to be reigned in. But I like something about both a big debut, and a big trans book, taking up space in a thoughtful but insistent way.

If you’re detecting some identification here, you’re right. How much is poetic or personal affinity? How much is the zeitgeist—the way the specific contours of ongoing (and, as smith reminds readers, long-standing) crisis shapes poetic form? How much is being white, curly-haired neurodivergent trans people in a shared age cohort?

Something also about smith being from Appalachia, me being from Texas. Reading their past in poems like “Lonely mountain town” and “red dirt garden goth girl” helped me feel into my own complex relationship with the places of my past, as they continue on, dreaming with smith:

…i dream a dyke bar
for every hollow, queeraoke sluts singin’ Tammy off key,
highways safe for walking, ballads & barn quilts & string figures
claiming joy. i dream we dredge rivers & find no women there.

I’m still such a sucker for art I can imagine myself into, imagine my body into as beautiful, worthy of desire. What bodies like mine are capable of. In this vein, I loved poems like, “towards an economy of anal delights” and “like any woman’s penis.” And of course, the weave: it’s always also a politics.

I like the way smith weaves their political thought with their records of sexual desire, fantasy, fulfillment. The repeated juxtapositions mean that you can’t miss it. E.g. “year of the rat”:

i hope you get where you’re going, that the state fails but pplx don’t. i hope i get fucked today & that men on stoops, on sidewalks, up grocery aisles, park benches, in passenger seats & behind desks all cease their leering, let a girl walk home in peace.

Not only that sex always has a politics, but also that queer trans sex has a politics. From this angle, stemmy things reads as a fulfillment what Juliet Jacques writes in the close of her piece “Écriture trans-féminine?” way back in 2018:

To examine the ways in which being trans or non-binary complicates or changes a whole range of experiences means no longer excluding the reality of sex and sexuality from the picture; incorporating it into an expanded écriture trans may help us to overcome any fear of transphobic detractors, and take the creativity unleashed by Cixous, Stone and others into unprecedented places. Through this, we might even realise the French equivalent of the English ‘transgender’ and become truly trans-genre.

Are we trans-genre now? No repose here if we are. stemmy things insists: take joy and go further.

A lot of stemmy things is about existing in a place (NYC, Berlin, NC memories), a time (2020s), and a matrix of cultural references (Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl). I don’t exactly know what to do with the NYC of it all. There’s this world that smith seems to be in or at least adjacent to, that I am admittedly adjacent to (albeit by proxy, from a distance) a poetics, a queer and trans scene, that has an aura of centrality. And how do I feel about it? By turns a little jealous of what I imagine to be the cool New York trans literary world, a little eye-roll-y of it, too. Not to pin any of this on smith (geez, Zoe, can a girl-them live?)! This is my shit—stemmy things just provides another occasion for feeling through fears of being peripheral, out-of-step.

For help, I turn to a poem outside of the book (a very smithian methodology) to a poem called “i cannot” by my friend Emily Brown: “I don’t want to move to the country with my polycule / just wanna live in a city where most of my friends live / and that has decent public transit infrastructure / like o’hara I cannot enjoy a park unless i’m fucking in it / and know there’s a subway nearby” This poem which, like stemmy things, both is and isn’t about NYC, is also about what pains we will or won’t suffer, what pleasures we insist on. And, ultimately, what we owe to each other and what we are able to offer (another kind of pleasure), “i love to stay late at the party and help clean up.”

There’s a scale in the above that rhymes with smith’s “wound / vision"": “…In the city i hear everything. / Lie—i lift what’s mine to hold.” smith stays at the party, lifts what’s theirs to hold, while still straining to form up into the larger we of collective struggle and resistance. Do they arrive? Does anyone? We do what we can, on borrowed time and stolen land and sometimes,

…Out in the street an I joins we
& we march, shout, crouch & lock arms you you you & you—
INTIFADA INTIFADA <clap clap clap> caps again like June  Jordan
& the voice in my throat goes gravel, set to gut by blood-bound
ancestors traipsing where they should not go. Me—i’m pavement,
step step step over stolen ground, hello. i don’t think
the world lets people be good & so we do what we do,
we do it here, in the world.