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The International Metatron Poetry Prize Finalists ❋ REFLECTIONS OF LIGHT ON WATER ❋ Tatum Howey
Reflections of Light on Water tries to locate the trans body in the disorientating after-image of a history that is not quite our history. These poems ask how intimacy might be displaced and transfigured in especially queer relation, accentuating the complicated entanglement of the amorous and gendered body. Ultimately, this work is about the nauseating relationship the subject has with itself and how the trans condition is, in many ways, the difficulty of being a subject at all.
Tatum Howey is a writer and doctoral candidate based in Los Angeles whose work circles around the political implications and potentials of risk. Both their poetry and scholarship explore the de-individuation of risk, where risk is understood as the vulnerability of being in relation. Their writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Wonder Press, The Capilano Review, Commo Magazine, LUX, and Mimesis: Film as Performance Magazine.
Who are you?
An impossible conjecture. If we are in part what we love, I love country music, movies, and gossip—because I love the story at its many scales.
What is your book about?
Sex, death, desire, and mourning. In another way it is about the power of speech after someone has been silent for a long time.
Could you tell us a bit about the process of writing this book?
The book is comprised of six sections and each section was made in a sudden and concerted fit of writing. Each one denotes a specific period of exasperation: right after my father died, a major breakup, when I began using testosterone. There’s an urgency to all the language, a kind of buildup and then release. One of my mentors said the poems are “lyrics at the end of their wits”.
What are some books you’ve read and enjoyed lately and/or books that influenced the writing in your submitted work?
While writing these poems I looked towards the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, Anne Carson’s Beauty of the Husband and “The Glass Essay”, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, and Nathanaël’s Je Nathanaël.
How would you describe your book using emojis only?
💌✨🌊
Anything else you’d like to share?
I am currently orbiting the world of Gillian Rose, and I would like to share something from her Love’s Work, which she wrote while dying of ovarian cancer: “To grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and others, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds. Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love. Exceptional, edgeless love effaces the risk of relation: that mix of exposure and reserve, of revelation and reticence. It commands the complete unveiling of the eyes, the transparency of the body. It denies that there is no love without power; that we are at the mercy of others and that we have others in our mercy.”
EXCERPT
muteness
Muteness, that was the word that lodged itself in me that morning. The feeling or general disposition I had been trying to locate. Muteness, quiet ambivalence, but as intentional. A certain modality, whose origin can be found in the textural quality of a stone. Consider muteness instead to describe how sound might be suspended in the air, hot air. Muted, I am unable to signal outward and likewise, nothing reaches me.