Stemmy Things

Evening & the sky is lowing, night slipping hir blue bird shell. See us, our many we’s, suture bound in deep ecologies—as though from hemlock we had drunk. […]

imogen xtian smith’s queer ecopoetry debut, stemmy things, includes prose poems and free verse organized across couplets and quatrains or spread more organically across the page, all of it imbued with the sensibility of a DJ (there are references to Nirvana, Coltrane, and R.E.M., alongside the Jesus and Mary Chain and SOPHIE), as smith illuminates how transness is and was always-already natural and part of our ecology.

i grow verdant with run-ons & tiny breasts jutting
north like haunted mountains. Sometimes i’m woman,
all gibbous, pearl & jazz, languidly unfixed beneath muslin
skies, gathering secrets in mouthy eaves. […]

Written “for the girl-thems,” smith’s exploration of trans girlhood praises the “femme dick” and “femmy cock,” claiming, “i’m the woman with a whiskery face, chipped nails / & girl cock dangling.” In addition to celebrating transness beyond the binary, smith interrogates their own intersectional identity as the descendent of both oppressor and oppressed, imagining Scottish ancestors as “north island shepherds, / knot weavers, cairn builders” and “[p]eat diggers”: 

i am a soft syllable my ancestors never uttered, a tone eluding their conquering tongues, leaving them fallow, yet speaking—how language holds hostage our worlds of intent.

stemmy things submerges readers in a deeply erotic ecopoetics with the repetition of words like sticky and soft, and “with angst, verse, smut, sex remixed & sprigging / tendrils down toppled walls.” While this manifesto of muchness might at times overwhelm, the only branches I felt could use gentle paring back were the overt mentions of “poems” themselves (recurring upwards of 50 times). What I wanted was to be left with the sensual alchemy of this garden: 

do with me like the bees     say grace     sticky sticky till i’m pleased as peonies you droolin’ down my creamy folds     i say my heart ain’t nuthin’ but a rusty old trowel handed down the dirt daughter line