Look Like
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What happens after the aftermath? Taking the word butch as portal, lineage, & linguistic talisman, LOOK LIKE is devotional towards change, a love letter that cleaves together sibling death, masculinity, inheritance, trans-erotics, & shared grief to write towards anyone who has struggled with the difficult pleasure of self-invention in the wake of loss. Wide ranging in its formal experiments, including a series of “stone butch sonnets,” invoking Wanda Coleman & Leslie Feinberg, LOOK LIKE oscillates between registers & lexicons, using comparison & negation to destabilize signifiers of masculinity & slyly shirk questions about gender & resemblance. For a speaker in the barbershop, in the intimacy & escape of cars stranded on highway shoulders, & on Queens’ sidewalks by florists, laundromats, & front yard gardens—each encounter constructs lineage & futurity through the complexities of the erotic, becoming, searching, & losing. LOOK LIKE is poetry of the body that offers a musicality that thrums in the mouth, inviting us into a world where we are responsible to—& in love with—all that our mortality connects us to.