A phrase often shouted at Pride marches and protests for LGBTQIA+ rights – We’re here, we’re queer – takes particular significance in the work of contemporary writers who are queering history. Take, for example, the poetry of Jos Charles in Feeld, or Jordy Rosenberg’s novel Confessions of the Fox. Historically, texts written by queer authors – or centered around queerness – have been destroyed, hidden, or coded. Queer people have always been here, in other words – but we don’t always see ourselves and our identities reflected in historical texts. Authors working in this field queer either real or imagined historical documents, rooting queerness – filling in the gaps in history where the queer community have been denied representation.
Trevor Ketner’s collection The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire (Wesleyan University Press, 2023) is a welcome addition to this field. In a 2022 essay for Poets & Writers, Ketner describes the intricate process they used to generate Wild Hunt Divinations, which is based on Shakespearean sonnets; they call this writing process ‘anagram sonnets’: “I would repurpose every letter in each line of the original poem to create the corresponding line in my own poem of the same length. I explicitly aimed to use the pool of letters in each line to form words that didn’t exist in the original line.” In other words, the line “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” becomes “my amateur she-hair, salt-scooped – elm” – preserving all the letters of the original line in an entirely new formulation.
The result is strange, in the very best sense of the word: a queer, pagan, kinky take on canonical poetry. Each poem is like turning over a gemstone to find new facets: at times, you can hear the original Shakespearian poem resonating, either through form or language; in other poems, the language and form is completely transformed. This collection is a “he/ hymn”, a “worn elegy”, a “charred surrealist sigh”: a working-over of Shakespeare in the way that coming out, or inhabiting a new identity, is a working-over of the self.
Unearthing the queer self in historical documents – either through reimagining an existing historical document, or through creating a new one (as in Rosenberg’s Confessions, a commentary on an imagined historical document by a fictional professor) – is a type of homemaking. In “[Is it thy will thy image should keep open]”, the speaker’s identity takes root in a context of violent opposition: “fundamentalists: die homo/ a they opens to a he softly conjured.” To take up space – make a home – as a queer person is an inherently radical act in a culture determined to erase the identities, histories, and the physical presence of queer people at every turn. Here, Ketner juxtaposes the violence and harshness of the cultural moment with the softness of transition and establishing identity – of making a home in their body.
Queerness and identity is defined and redefined, translated and translated again; it’s both the “modern, wispy/ queer (wet, cotton hankies)” and a “saintly wound”, a “complex fetish (wolf, honey, cloth)” and “trans lush”. These metamorphoses, which are often framed in an ecopoetic context, frequently occur within a single poem, as in this passage from “[When in the chronicle of wasted time]”: “i he/ fennel / frond – he, she, i stratifies, twigs to pieces – / i feud you: manly, male – breathtaking bud.” Transness is transformation in Ketner’s collection: as natural as a flower blooming, or fruit moving through the stages of ripeness. Some of the most beautiful images in this collection are of transition, as told through metaphors of nature: “i trans lush,” “deerhush meets dawn’s cool pelt – i adjust his / to theirs – boy bulge softening”, “to trans bulge, moss it”.
The collection also plays with eroticism and kink, mirroring the tension between identity and society through the metaphor of sexual pleasure. As Kenter writes, “fetish is motif” throughout the collection – kink, a physical tension, is portrayed as parallel to the historical experience of being trans in society.“hit me,” Ketner writes in “[Those parts of thee that the world’s eye doth view]”, “(growls, that’s hot) – touch moss (devotion).” Here, we can see the juxtaposition of kink and society’s violence with the tenderness of the image of nature and queerness. Another example comes from “[Like as to make our appetites more keen]”, where Ketner writes, “use fag/ as name, feel butch elation – a tight rod thud,” another moment where the tension of society’s violence is paralleled with the sexual tension of name-calling, leading to gratification.
This collection is a beautiful contribution to the field of queered history. To take up space while queer is an inherently radical act in a culture hellbent on erasing the identities, histories, and the physical presence of queer people at every turn; to queer an author as canonical as Shakespeare is a radical act of reclamation and homemaking.
Anna Newman holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Maryland. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, Hayden’s Ferry Review, RHINO, and elsewhere. They are the recipient of the 2022 Nature and Place Prize from Frontier Poetry, judged by Amaud Johnson. They live in Salt Lake City, Utah, where they are a poetry reader for Quarterly West.