There Are Trans People Here
H. Melt’s There Are Trans People Here builds on their 2018 chapbook, On My Way to Liberation, in celebration of trans community and the expression of “gender euphoria.” Drawing on the queer archive, Melt weaves together their personal journey and Jewish heritage, while pushing back against the emphasis on struggle in order to proudly proclaim, “Joy brought me here.”
Melt’s book draws on the author’s immersion in Chicago’s queer community, but it’s also in conversation with contemporary poets like Ross Gay and Jamaal May. Inspired by Nan Goldin’s The Other Side and To Survive on This Shore by Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre, Melt punctuates the collection with photo collages of the trans community from the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art’s “Transgender Hiroes” 2013 promotional broadside.
While the passion in Melt’s critique of TERFs and cis patriarchy is compelling and necessary, these poems sometimes feel stifled through literal explication. Melt aims “to center trans joy,” but the ongoing fight to exist often intrudes on the delight the collection strives to highlight, as in the poem “City of Trans Liberation” with its wishful invocation of a world in which “[ …] Trans Day of Remembrance / celebrates those who died / of natural causes.”
One of the book’s best surprises is the way transformation becomes a kind of birthright, as in the poem “On My Way to Liberation:”
when the nazis
came for his family
in Kovno, Lithuania
my grandfather
dressed like a girl
to stay close to his
mother & sisters
When he immigrated
to the united states
he changed his name
from Michelson to Melton
Even as the collection struggles for the high notes, there are evocative moments of connection like “All the Missing Sweetness,” in which, alluding to Jewish New Year rituals and observance: they plead “forgive me & I’ll forgive you / for forcing me into a skirt,” and later “[…] for eating apples raw / without dipping them in honey first.” This sentiment is mirrored in “Dysphoria Is Not My Name:”
Look, in this country alone, there are
millions of us, naturally occurring
sweet things, with names
we carved ourselves.
We are lifted by these moments of sweetness, even as we know “the riots must continue.”