torrin a. greathouse lets you know right off the bat what Deed is all about. The opening poem of the collection begins, “There is no known root for how the word cum / came to mean what it does. But imagine.” The sentence continues onto the next line, but the enjambment leaves momentarily open many possibilities for the type of imagination greathouse urges. There is an etymology to be imagined, which is the direction the poem goes in, but so much more: the ways in which words can go from meaning something to doing something, the slippage between the “cum” of ejaculation and the “come” of transformation or becoming, and the possibility of an original, hypothetical instance of cumming that could give the word an historical root rather than a merely lingual one. All four of these impulses – the etymological, the performative, the transformative, and the mythological – intertwine throughout this collection to carve out a space in the world for new forms of experience and, in doing so, reveal how that space has already been there.
As is made clear from the first poem, greathouse’s world is unapologetically trans. That opening poem, “T4T,” which is an abbreviation of “trans for trans,” is the best sexual representation I’ve read of myself outside of, perhaps, some of John Donne’s metaphysical poems. greathouse lists Donne among their influences in the acknowledgements, but while Donne was an ordained priest, greathouse makes it clear they are a heretic:
[…] But shit, turns outthere’s no emoji for a rubber dick
sat heavy on the tongue. Go figure. I can
still feel it twitch. Hold you in my mouth
spit slick apocrypha.
This is a moment both oral and lingual, mythological and etymological. greathouse may literally have their lover’s “rubber dick” in their mouth and spit out the cum as apocrypha to the cisnormative blow job’s scripture. Or they may feel the nascent word for their relationship on the tip of her tongue, letting the pressure of expression build up as she searches for how to articulate it, until finally her mouth erupts as her tongue releases the opening “t.” The etymology of “cum” may be irretrievable, but that of “T4T” is present in this twitching.
Disability is another crucial aspect of the world greathouse constructs in Deed. The dominant metaphor of “On Possession,” the first major engagement with this theme, is also religious but one of rapture rather than scripture. The poem says that seizures were once understood to be “the devil / possessing the sick.” It is through this and similar moments that the potential for harm in others’ speech about greathouse is made most explicit: the diagnosis of a seizure makes her sick, spiritually as well as medically. As soon as the diagnosis is spoken, greathouse’s own words become suspect – one who is possessed by the devil cannot be trusted to speak as or for themselves – a familiar situation to both trans and chronically ill people. In response to this, greathouse seeks other forms of possession to find a way to reclaim their seizures. A “pink leather collar” provides one possible escape, namely, possession by a “dom” rather than a disease. But the collar is too tight and constrains greathouse’s voice, “padlock / caught in my throat.” Finally, another of greathouse’s lovers suggests “that the distance between / orgasm & seizure is thin,” a different form of self-possession, this time an explicitly pleasurable one. Such a reclamation cannot change how greathouse’s doctors see her, but this lover suggests a better world, in which possession means its direct effects and nothing more:
They hold me through a seizure
or pin me to the bed, fingers
a bit inside my mouth. I am wed
to their hands.
In this ending, greathouse is triply-possessed – by a seizure, by an orgasm, and by a lover – but none of those include the violence that a medical declaration of a single possession by a seizure causes. These transformations of meaning throughout the poem allow greathouse to find a temporary escape from the oppressive systems that would declare them less than human. The doctors create a world in which greathouse cannot speak for themself by declaring them possessed; they declare themselves possessed in order to create a world in which they can be loved.
Worlds cannot be built from scratch, though, and many of greathouse’s poems find building blocks in existing works. These uses go beyond mere reference and reveal new resonances in even the most familiar sources. When I saw the subtitle “a burning haibun / after Bruce Springsteen” for the poem “Dancing in the Dark,” for example, I knew exactly where it would end up. Greathouse invented the burning haibun, a variation on the haibun – a Japanese form combining a prose poem and a haiku.. It opens with a prose poem, includes at least one intermediate stage of burning or erasure, and ends with a final burning that leaves only a haiku. The opening prose poem in “Dancing in the Dark” is about a summer spent listening to the titular Springsteen song while longing to be anything but a man. The poem’s narrator sees a possibility for themselves in the song’s desire: “I wanna press my lips to the hole his voice has burned in the dark & ask him if he ever stopped wanting to change.” What Springsteen’s voice burns out in the first round of erasure is the song, and that line becomes, “I al press my lips to llll the dark & ask lllllllll to change.” Finally, “change” from that sentence makes it into the ending haiku, which resurrects the song from its erased status to end on the lyrics that I had immediately known must have drawn greathouse to that song:
“Check llll my llllllll look l llllllll in the llllll
mirror llllllll I wanna lllllll change ll My llll
llllll clothe ll s lll my ll hair lllll my face” ll
While the lyrics were not a surprise – I have listened to this song to hear those specific lines too many times to count – I did not expect the feeling they created. In the progressive burnings, the form seems to suggest a fourth section, as if what is left after the haiku, too, burns is the true feeling behind the poem. The complete picture of wanting to change, if one can be said to exist, lives only in this implied silence.
Two poems later, greathouse returns to her musical inspirations with “Double Sonnet for Transgender Dysphoria Blues.” While these sonnets are each fourteen lines of ten syllables, they don’t follow a rhyme scheme. Instead, greathouse took a fourteen-word portion of the lyrics of the titular Against Me! song for each one and used those as the last word of the sonnet’s line, which makes each one a golden shovel as well. The sonnet has existed for centuries; Terence Hayes invented the golden shovel in 2010. The resulting poem is a chimera, borrowing the number and length of lines from one of poetry’s most canonical forms, the line endings from a new one, and the subject from a punk band. In each of these sonnets, greathouse shows a different side to the lines than the one that Laura Jane Grace uses in her song, the same way that the burning haibun added new layers of meaning to Springsteen’s words. In the first, the singer feels no one sees her as a woman; in greathouse’s rewriting, one other person properly seeing them gives them hope that, while everyone else may need more than the “summer dress” the singer has on, the “dazzle” of greathouse’s makeup might be enough for them to all “mistake me for what I am.” In the second, the lyrics are about how the singer is not seen as sexy, and greathouse interrogates the paradox between these insults and the ubiquitous hypersexualization of trans women. There may be “no cunt in your strut” and yet “men still try to claim this strut / is bait for their animal lust.” Rewriting both lyrics, greathouse finds no concrete answers, only a productive tension. It is possible to love something – as I love this song and expect greathouse chose it as an inspiration because they do too – and acknowledge its insufficiency.
greathouse ends the collection with “SICK4SICK,” an explication of a final neologism. Just as there is beauty in finding a word outside language’s standard usage that describes yourself better than any common one, there is also beauty in finding someone else whose body speaks the same way yours does:
How, with fingers laced together, our boots & canes
click in time—unsteady rhythm of a metronome’s limp
wrist. All sway & swish, first person I ever saw walk with
a lisp.
Not only is there the comradery of a walk that says the same thing about another’s body as yours says about your own, but this can create a world – even if it is only a world of two – within which the only meaning that matters is one of your own creation. This is a world carved out within the broader world in which an ER visit is a date and medications are there for you when saints aren’t. greathouse’s body and poetic forms are chimeras, which at one point they define as “the best parts of / other animals sewn together,” and through this SICK4SICK relationship they have also made their world a chimera. The parts that work – the compassion of a lover going through the same things, canes, acetaminophen – are all that matters, sewn together to form a whole that excludes, for example, the doctors who can’t cure them and who therefore aren’t mentioned a single time in this poem. It is moments like these that I refer to when I call greathouse’s poetry performative. These poems do not merely give a new perspective on existing worlds but create the worlds of which they speak. The effects of greathouse’s world creation go well beyond themselves, though: the world of these poems is one that many of us feel more at home in than the one we are repeatedly told we live in. And the poems’ power comes from suggesting that the distance between the two is not as great as it seems; sometimes, all it takes to get there is the right relationship or, maybe, just the right word. The world that greathouse creates isn’t going to fit everyone, but through the transformations of her influences and attention to how to change what a given piece of language does, she teaches each reader how they can take her poems and use them for the world that they need, too.
