GLR January-February 2025

E LI A NDREW R AMER Death & Transfiguration FAMILY: Poems by Joy Ladin Persea Books. 76 pages, $17. ONCE OUT OF NATURE Selected Essays on the Transforma ti on of Gender by Joy Ladin Persea Books, 158 pages, $20. That said, Mama provides an unflinching look at the diffi cult circumstance of a Black family in struggle and of a young woman’s efforts to care for her half-brother in the midst of it all. Intensely dramatic events occur, but the intrepid author nav igates through it all with honesty, authenticity, and the support of her friends and loved ones. The epilogue reports that Har grove and Dinushka are now a family of five, having added twin girls to their household after the events recounted in the mem oir. If Nikkya Hargrove chooses to write a sequel, this reader will eagerly pick up a copy. _______________________________________________________ Anne Charles co-hosts a cable access show from Montpelier, VT. T HE 20TH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHER Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote about prophets both ancient and modern, such as his good friend Martin Luther King. Heschel’s notion of a prophet was of someone who tells us truths about reality that many of us cannot or would prefer not to see. Whenever I read the words of Joy Ladin, my cells tingle in a way that tells me I’m in the presence of a living prophet. In her two new books, simultaneously published, Joy Ladin continues to engage us in both the depth of her experience and lover. Hargrove’s former classmate at Bard, Lauren, willingly babysits Jonathan as Hargrove goes on dates. Lauren also of fers ongoing support in other ways, like accompanying her on an eight-hour drive to pick up Jonathan from the author’s grand parents’ house in Virginia. Much space is devoted to Dinushka, Hargrove’s Sri Lankan partner and later wife, a figure who will ingly undertakes and ultimately embraces the challenges of queer co-parenting. Possibly mirroring the nature of memory, chronological dis continuity is a prominent feature of the book, though the writer peppers her account with dates and ages of participants to ground us. She also intersperses the piece with historical and sociological statistics to establish a national context. Despite the riveting subject matter, this loose structure occasionally presents narrative difficulties for the reader. A character is men tioned at one point and then introduced again twenty pages later; sometimes apartment locations can be confusing. Language use also disappoints at times. Characters “smile from ear to ear” and “straw breaks the camel’s back” on several occasions. One frus trating distraction is the repeated description of characters as being “always there.” Always where?

Joy Ladin. Cover photo for Once Out of Nature.

its expansiveness, offering us a reflecting mirror to our own queer selves in this intensely challenging time. If you aren’t fa miliar with her story and her work, Joy Ladin knew from an early age that the boy she was perceived to be was in reality a girl. However, it was only slowly, step by step, that she was able to begin her transition—starting in her mid-forties—in a jour ney that created rifts with her friends, her family, her children, and her job, all of which she explores in these new books. In a culture that tends to be uncomfortable talking about dis ease, disability, and death, Ladin directly addresses these topics in her poems, and she does so with clarity and courage. The first poems in Family are about her mother’s journey toward death. In “Last Spring” she writes: “Robin please before it’s too late/ remind my mother/ it’s spring.” She then wanders into her own declining health, comically playing with an old traditional Jew ish affirmation, written by the medieval philosopher Mai monides: “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the messiah, and though he tarry, none the less, I await his coming every day.” Here’s Ladin in “In the New Place”: “I believe with perfect faith/ the birds that sound so far away/ are really right outside.” The Maimonides passage comes from what’s sometimes called “The Thirteen Principles of Faith,” but you don’t have to be Jewish to be inspired by Ladin’s words. There’s a poem ti tled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Summer” (a reference to Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”) that weaves together her own illness, the end of her tenured teaching position, her mother’s condition, and the world around her: “Less carbon in the atmosphere then. Fewer extinctions per/ minute. Fewer blanks in my mother’s head.” In “Sitting in Wordsworth’s Garden,” she writes: “and something eloquent,/ original, and vague—/ something a flower might say.” In Once Out of Nature, Ladin has gathered eleven essays that she wrote between 2011 and 2022. Just as you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy Ladin’s poetry, you don’t have to be trans gender to appreciate her words of wisdom. Like her poetry, these essays are grounded in her embodied experience and in the world around her, fleshing out the sequence of events in her long journey.

TheG & LR

40