TRANZ: Poems

At its core, Williams’s debut collection reflects on the complex journey of being a trans woman in the United State. It also intermixes poems about adoption, birth families, substance use disorder, and childhood trauma. Many works in the collection are in confessional style. For example, in “revising the danish girl,” she writes, “I confess: there is not a color to rival how it feels / to be so woman. / no canvas wide enough to capture the landscape it inspires.” There is also an overarching theme of pain and grief from hate and transphobia, especially in the digital age, when creating an online dating profile opens users up to transphobic remarks on a constant basis. That’s partnered with a prevalence of hateful content on the internet at every turn. Williams captures that sentiment well in the poem “lesson,” in which she writes, “Tranz taught me / there is no cruelty which is / impossible / but what i want / for whoever says / i won’t have it: a life.”