Overview

Explaining a Dress by Jessie Keary is both a recollection and an homage to the forgotten history of trans women. Rooted in the precise craft of erasure poetry, these pieces resonate with quiet protest, sophisticated confidence, and untold violences of the past. In Keary's work, the clothing of trans women-a white scarf, a gingham gown, silk shirts-becomes an emblem of resistance, tenderness, and the radical beauty of being seen.

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9798990183872

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Reviews

""Here is a sensory plunge at once harsh and kind, historic and immediate, factual and emotional, heart-rending yet courage-making. Brava! for this remarkable art of erasure and indeed vindication."" -Diana Tokaji, 2024 (Not in Love) Tanka Challenge First Place Winner, and author of Six Women in a Cell, which won Best Indie Book Award Nonfiction 2021 ""Explaining a Dress offers a chorus, a constellation of voices and lives tragically damaged or, worse, ended. This collection of found poems curated into erasure form reminds us of what is left unsaid and, more importantly, what requires timely and timeless shouting."" -Rebecca Evans, author of Safe Handling and Tangled by Blood ""Using the form of erasure, the poet introduces us to a chorus of trans-feminine people erased from history. Erasure is always an act of oppression. But in using erasure as a poetic technique the collection becomes a powerful historical reckoning that is complex and poignant and serves as both a tribute to and a vindication of the lives erased."" -Nancy Miller Gomez, author of Inconsolable Objects ""What a brilliant idea Explaining a Dress is. A poetry collection that highlights the struggles of trans women in a series of erased newspaper articles dating between 1889 and 1959. [Explaining a Dress] challenges the reader, prods at the brain cells with a red-hot poker, stirring up feelings of indignation and injustice, and then forces us to lay back in our lazy boy chairs to contemplate how far we have come, what exactly lies ahead, and has our journey been in vain?"" -Yasmin Goldie, Frontier Poetry Editorial Team Member

Author Information

Jessie Keary is a Midwestern, trans writer with too many hobbies. Their poetry can be found in Transmasculine Poetics (Sundress Publications), Sweeter Voices Still (Belt Publishing), and various corners of the internet.

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