Ava Nathaniel Winter’s brilliant-minded collection Transgenesis fearlessly explores the spaces where gender, identity, and family history overlap. In these immediate contemplations of Jewish forebears, desire, racism, and sexism, the speaker scrutinizes personal and societal complicity in the horrors which have shaped today’s conversations regarding human rights. These verses unite psychosexual texts, family lore, historical objects, archival evidence, and personal inheritances in a manner that creates not only the speaker’s authentic voice, but also their authentic self.
Poems like “Confession” take a deep look at religious traditions and identities that dictate who can and cannot participate in them. This open and bold poem’s opening line declares, “I am no Jew by Orthodox standards.” The speaker admits, “My mother, born of Irish-Catholic stock, / never converted and neither have I.” However, the speaker’s father “insists on Orthodoxy” even though the father’s interest in the practices seem superficial. At the poem’s core, however, is the speaker’s discomfort with “questioning the few stories that survive” because they fear their questioning will dishonor their father and grandfather:
Still, I worry that I dishonor
my father and my father’s father
by questioning the few stories that survive
when eight of my great-grandmother’s siblings
did not. You want to confess, Rabbi says,
better you should find a priest.
Thus, the speaker introduces readers to a new kind of generational trauma, one that stems from a faith’s rigidity and a family’s stories. Mirroring that rigidity is the poem’s form: six left-aligned stanzas with cautiously ended lines that transport readers through the speaker’s complex identity journey and the confining emotional space the speaker’s guilt has created.
“Puławy” is a gorgeous, confessional poem that blends desire and romance with a deep study of one’s heritage. Specifically, the speaker ties this study to a place—Puławy, a city in Eastern Poland seized by the Wehrmacht in 1939. In 1940, the Germans raided Polish intelligentsia, and by the war’s end, the city’s Jewish population ceased to exist. It never recovered. In Winter’s poem, the city forces the speaker to reckon with the city’s historical significance to the speaker’s own identity. The speaker recognizes that they cannot recognize Puławy without acknowledging the “smoke rising / from chimneys hidden in the underbrush” or the places where “Jews dug bunkers into the earth.” The poem also acknowledges that, sadly, the prejudices which created the Holocaust still exist, but are transferred to a different group of people, specifically the LGBTQ+ community. The speaker depicts how a Polish man’s “jaw tightened” as they and their partner pass, perhaps because the man remembered “the Order Police setting out / each morning on what they called Jew hunts.” The poem transforms into an examination of how such prejudices also fueled capitalistic economic tendencies and gave locals who worked with the Germans “their bread and butter.” Nonetheless, “Puławy” is not the only poem in Winters’s collection to tackle capitalism’s multiplex relationship with hate.
“WWII German SS Lebensborn Stickpin $30” scrutinizes the preservation and sale of Nazi relics. In it, the speaker wonders who would have “leaned / close enough / to an SS officer’s / neck” to examine such a pin. The speaker reminds readers that such relics carry a terribly violent and disgusting story, specifically designed for “intimacies” for someone such as “a lover” or “someone backed / against a wall.” Despite its brutal legacy, the pin is available “for sale as militaria.” The speaker also offers readers an insight to the type of person who would not only own and wear the pin, but also perform as an “SS reenactor”: “he is in a bedroom, / his chest pressing closer, / the legend all too clear.” The speaker therefore draws attention to the fact that for those drawn to SS reenacting and insignia ownership, the intent behind performing such a role and owning such a relic overshadows any denial about Nazi affiliation, fascination, or empathy.
Transgenesis offers readers a new frame for marginalization and oppression, as well as the Jewish and transgender experience. It provides readers with a close critique of capitalism’s—and the human psyche’s—darkest corners. At the same time, it dissects the degradation and humiliation on which so much of history is founded—and it challenges readers to begin working towards a better, more inclusive, future.
Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. A poet and essayist, her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University, and is the Humanities Coordinator at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College. She also serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Southern Review of Books.