We Are Mermaids: Poems

by Stephanie Burt

Overview

Effusive new poems by Stephanie Burt, “perhaps our greatest poet of having yet more to say” (Boston Review)

Stephanie Burt’s poems in We Are Mermaids are never just one thing. Instead, they revel in their multiplicity, their interconnectedness, their secret powers to become much more than they at first seem. In these poems, punctuation marks make arguments for their utility and their rights to exist. Frozen isn’t simply another Disney animated musical but “the Most Trans Movie Ever.” Mermaids, werewolves, and superheroes don’t just fret over divided natures and secret identities, but celebrate their wholeness, their unique abilities, and their erotic potential. Flowers in this collection bloom into exactly what they are meant to be—revealing themselves, like bleeding hearts, beyond their given names.

With humor and insight, Burt’s poems have always cherished and examined the things of this world, both real and imagined objects of fascination and desire. In this resplendent new collection, her observation and care flourish into her most fulfilled book yet. These poems shake off indecisiveness and doubt to reach joys through romance and family, through nature (urban and otherwise), and through imaginative community. We Are Mermaids is a trans book, a fangirl book, a book about coming together. It’s also Burt’s best book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644452059
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	10/04/2022
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	221,530
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Stephanie Burt is the author of five poetry collections, including Advice from the Lights and Belmont, and several works of criticism, including Don’t Read Poetry and Close Calls with Nonsense. She teaches at Harvard University.

Editorial Reviews

08/15/2022

Burt (After Callimachus) explores pop culture, myth, and flora and fauna in her latest, a layered reflection on identity. In “Cabbage Whites,” which, like many of these poems, reflects on the trans experience, the speaker is a butterfly addressing others who have emerged from their states as caterpillars, who “were meant to be left and could be left/ amid our claque of leaves, each on our own,” but once transformed, “No danger, no inclement/ weather, no stalking or/ aerial predator/ can make us choose to live that way again.” In “At the Parkway Deli,” Burt describes childhood trips to a Jewish deli where she was drawn to the “world-famous pick-your-own-pickle bar.” Evocative descriptions include “green sour tomatoes that pop/ whenever you cut or bite into them,/ intricate as a satellite inside;/ sauerkraut in three colors, like some nation’s flag/ left outdoors in a storm and shredded,” and the poem ends with the poet reflecting on how these visits foreshadowed the salt cravings common among women undergoing hormone replacement therapy (“You can know what you need/ before you know why”). In “Cinderella,” Burt remixes the fairy tale, “The trans story is the heroine has to be trans/ because nobody else in the capital shares/ her size.” Burt’s imagination is rendered in mellifluous, energetic language in this memorable book. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Burt’s imagination is rendered in mellifluous, energetic language in this memorable book.” —Publishers Weekly

“The poems in We Are Mermaids can be skillfully decoded as trans allegories, or climate anxiety, or disgust at U.S. Fascism, but limiting these poems to one reading would miss the pleasures of their inventiveness, their playfulness, their ease at existing in many states at once.”—Robin Arble, Heavy Feather Review

“Stephanie Burt’s newest collection, We Are Mermaids, is a time capsule of girlhood, a transfiguration of silence into song, a mermaid’s scales rearranged into poems.”—C. E. Janecek, Colorado Review

“Oriented toward a queer futurity’s potential, these poems rarely land in certainty. . . . Burt reminds us that the surface reflects to the observer just one story, one script, and when we dip below what initially appears, we meet numerous realms and ways of being as mysterious and lovely as the unknown that flourishes on the ocean floor.”—Madeleine Wattenberg, The Georgia Review

“The poems in Stephanie Burt’s We Are Mermaids are like modified Fabergé eggs—their bejeweled descriptions crack open to reveal the real yolk of the deeply personal. . . .This is uplifting and transformative work.”—Matthea Harvey

“In poems rich and strange, Stephanie Burt offers us all possible incarnations—what we were, what we weren’t, what we might have been, what we may yet be—while honoring what each sacred individual life has always been. . . .This is a poet of dazzling skill, mystical vision, wild imagination, sensual intuition.”—Laura Kasischke

“Stephanie Burt's poems are everything at once: thrilling, ferociously charming, effervescently specific about enormous emotions and nerdy passions, as dazzling and illuminating as a photon blast.”—Douglas Wolk, author of All of the Marvels

“Stephanie Burt delivers her most intimate and masterful work to date in We Are Mermaids, a glorious ode to personal dawnings and breaking through the binary to honor our most authentic selves, no matter the struggle to get there, like fish out of water who always knew they belonged to both the water and the air.”—Amber Tamblyn

From the Publisher

07/01/2022

Notable literary critic and Harvard English professor Burt, who transitioned to female in 2017, offers a fifth collection in which mermaids, werewolves, and superheroes revel in their wholeness and punctuation marks argue their position. With a 15,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal