Tamiko Beyer

Poet and writer Tamiko Beyer is the author the poetry collections Last Days (Alice James Books 2021) and We Come Elemental (Alice James Books 2013), and chapbooks Dovetail (co-authored with Kimiko Hahn, Slapering Hol Press 2017) and bough breaks (Meritage Press 2011).

In a 2021 review, The Lantern Review notes: “Featuring a group of charismatic young revolutionaries and their struggle to navigate a post-apocalyptic world, Last Days celebrates hope, resilient joy, and the beauty of human interconnectedness. Beyer writes with the deep tenderness, empathy, and breathtaking lyric clarity that is a hallmark of her work.” Reviewing the same title for The Adroit Journal, Sarah D'Stair writes, “Despite the apocalyptic tone of its title, Tamiko Beyer’s Last Days is a profoundly optimistic book. In what the poet herself has described as an act of ‘radical imagination,’ the collection envisions a societal renaissance toward justice and equity, toward an evolved consciousness that sees all living matter as a part of a singular, vast, interdependent organism.”

In a Lambda Literary review of We Come Elemental, Arielle Yarwood observes that, “With a lean, lyrical style, Beyer asks the reader to contemplate the connection between the natural world and ourselves; how water and mud and land intersect with identity and body and politics; and whether the lines we draw are as firm as we would have ourselves believe.” In an introduction to her work in the “Queering Nature” issue of literary journal Fourth River, the editors write, “Tamiko Beyer asks us to make our queer revolution intersect with concerns beyond our capitalist identities: guns and oil, the ways in which our queer love can break systems.”

“To fail and to trust. Writing into queer :: eco :: poetics,” is the title of Beyer's 2014 essay first published in Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics, in which the poet states, “If there is any truth I can express (particularly as a queer woman of color), the only way I can come close to doing so is to pierce the veneer of transparency that we pull over language. To expose its materiality and enforced thinking. To begin to expose the ways language has been used for centuries as a tool to prop up systems of oppression, such as capitalism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. And thereby attempt to communicate in a way that asks for a different kind of reading, of sense making, of connecting.” Later in the same essay, she writes, “As a queer writer with a very specific relationship to the concept of the ‘natural,’ I am interested in exploring new ways of understanding, toward an ultimate transformation of thought and behavior, around what is ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural.’ This is what I travel toward, writing in a queer :: eco :: poetics.”

Beyer is the recipient of awards from the PEN America Robert J. Dau Prize, the Kinereth Gensler Award, and the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Award. She has received fellowships and residencies from Kundiman, Hedgebrook, VONA/Voices. She publishes Starlight and Strategy, a monthly newsletter for living life wide awake and shaping change. She is a queer, multiracial (Japanese and white), cisgender woman and femme, living and writing in on Massachusett, Wampanoag, and Pawtucket land. A social justice communications writer and strategist, she spends her days writing truth to power. 

In August 2021, Beyer was a guest blogger for Harriet.