Encounters in the Crisis Ordinary is deliberately written using an experimental ethnographic methodology that blurs the lines between poetry and theory through the written encounter. As many of these poems are inspired by or contain reference to more traditional academic texts, they have been titled accordingly – creating a bibliography through poetic headings and paying homage to the texts that have helped me make sense of this messy experience called life.
This story is not a rehearsal of trauma or an ‘It Gets Better’ futural narrative, but nor is it a story that ignores the trauma and violence that so often haunt trans life, or a story that suggests that medical and legal transition are not vital resources for trans survival. In the end, it may not even be a story that takes transness, or suicide itself, as its primary focal point.
This is a story about the crisis of everyday life, of cruel optimism’s lure, of learning to dance with ghosts, and of the in-breaking of otherwise possibilities without the promise of futurity. This is a story that displaces trauma as a dominant lens for understanding trans embodiment, by focusing on the eschatological moments where life interrupts (and even shatters) death’s hold on temporality. This is a story that begins and ends in stuckness, in the inescapable interregnum, that insists that an excess of life exists even in the moments of acute crisis and immi/a/nent death. -Publisher
