Remi Recchia

“Aphorism | Paroxysm is at turns hilarious and sacred. In the collection, Remi Recchia uses biblical erasure, social media, and more traditional poetry to sing and extol the transmasculine experience and call out religious bigotry. Recchia writes ‘Trans people are perfect and exactly as God made them (trans),’ and this collection is a praise song to such.” —Erin Elizabeth Smith, author of DOWN

“Through tweet screenshots and blacked-out Bible verses, Remi Recchia’s Aphorism | Paroxysm invites readers to undertake a journey of self-love at the intersection of transness and faith. This self-empowerment, however, does not come without a price: Each ‘aphorism’ of transmasculine joy is coupled with the ‘paroxysms’ that necessarily accompany reconciliation, self-creation, and the palpable pain—through deadnaming, misunderstanding, inaccurate history, and a longed-for (denied) childhood, among other realities—of walking and breathing as a trans individual. Recchia’s empyrean verse and curation/reconfiguration of found texts assert that trans beauty, while hard-fought, is anything but incompatible with God’s grace; God created all of us. As a non-binary individual myself, I found in reading Aphorism | Paroxysm something I seldom do in my everyday life—hope.” —Dani Putney, author of Mix-Mix and Salamat sa Intersectionality, finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry

Narrated in just twelve interconnected quatrains, weight is the gravitational force that pulls us to the earth is a chapbook between dreams. The poems find the speaker located in a dreamscape much like our own world but with startling deviations: carpooling to work (with a dragon), going to the dentist (to find diamonds in one’s gum tissue), footwear accessories (bedazzled with larvae). The tone is, in turns, quippy, earnest, and lyric.

It would be easy to say that living between and above and below this sequence of surreality is the “theme” of gender identity, sexual politics, or an eating disorder. But the thing about transness and gendered embodiment—and the ways that others attempt to legislate it—is that it’s so individual. There is not and never has been a monolith of transgender people. There is not one singular trans narrative. There has, however, and there continues to be, an overwhelming clamor against transgender people. The impacts of this violence are real. The impacts of this violence are deadly. weight is the gravitational force that pulls us to the earth is partially written in response to MAGA’s attempted obliteration of individuality, freedom of the press, and, yes, democracy.

The role of the poet in our current political circumstances, as understood by this chapbook, is to keep dreaming, living, and loving. It is to recognize the humanity alive and beating in all of us, especially when such acknowledgement is refused by those in power. weight is the gravitational force that pulls us to the earth offers its readers an alternate perspective on a life worth living shepherded by a speaker “beyond the utterance.”

“In From Gold, Ghosts, Remi Recchia gives us an entrancing collage of syntax that becomes both the signature and the potential savior of loss, as his lines cope with but also make evocative leaps across ghostly gaps in the history. “With eyes/ to find a carved heart,” Recchia’s poetic attention produces a lode-like record of an unfinished forgetting. For all that time and greed has claimed, this book shows how the reach of lyric inquiry can still find new ways back.” —Geffrey Davis, author of One Wild Word Away and Night Angler

The poems in Sober offer a visceral and unflinching examination of familial loss, sobriety, sexual assault, and transitioning in a world full of danger and violence. Through surprising wordplay and varying forms, Recchia invites the reader to acknowledge the full spectrum of life, especially when it is difficult but also when it is gentle.