In Your Nature

Poems that show us a world in which precedent for gender transition is everywhere if you know how to look.

＂I delete my history / badly,＂ writes Estlin McPhee in this searing, witty, lyrical, and elegiac debut collection of poems about intersections of trans identity, magic, myth, family, and religion. The line refers at once to a young person’s browser data that reveals an interest in gender transition; an adult’s efforts to reconcile complicated relationships; a culture’s campaign to erase queerness and transness from the historical record; and a religion’s attempt to pretend that its own particular brand of miraculous transformation is distinct from the kind found in folktales or real life. Populated by transmasculine werewolves, homoerotic Jesuses, adolescent epiphanies, dutiful sisters, boy bands, witches, mothers who speak in tongues, and nonnas who cross the sea, this is a book in which relational and narrative continuity exists, paradoxically, as a series of ruptures with the known.

Estlin McPhee is a writer and librarian who lives on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and are the author of the poetry chapbook Shapeshifters (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2018). Estlin’s writing has appeared in journals across North America; their poem ＂Lupo Mannaro＂ was named the Poetry Gold Winner in Alberta’s 2020 Magazine Awards. For many years, they co-organized REVERB, a queer reading series in Vancouver. In Your Nature is Estlin’s debut poetry collection.