jaye simpson’s a body more tolerable emerges as a knife cutting across her body to reveal and remake.
While reading the collection, I spent a lot of time thinking about the policing of transgender bodies currently happening in the United States, and the ongoing attacks on Indigenous women. With pained gasps of verse, simpson projects resistance.
simpson chews over existence in a body that must be perceived, a body that refuses being ignored or rewritten. The three sections of the book mark stages of metamorphosis and phases of self-construction. simpson ultimately remakes themself divine, as part of what she constructs to be the divinity of transgender existence.
The first section, “WOMB // LESS,” wades through capture and loss, with biting lines such as: “can we be more than the grief bestowed upon our brow? / can our rages be hallowed if we are expected to ask nicely.” But as much as it’s an expression of grief for her Indigenous kin suffering under colonial frameworks more broadly, it’s also a grief that is very personal to simpson’s queerness and gender. In “nimana” she sees a little girl singing a song that she can only “croak” with “a confusing gender tongue.” Grief whirls across the pages in this first section; she imagines herself as a mother losing her child, as calling out for a sister, auntie, mother, daughter, as hearing voices that no one else acknowledges.
The second part, “DESIRABILITY MAKES A FOOL OF US ALL,” narrows in on the uncertainty of desire and desirability, but nonetheless attempts to break free into queerer expression. The journey is complicated in this part, and sexuality here is full of rejection and disconnect. simpson uses language to refer to her body that feels more mechanical than anything else, writing that sex feels like “a gear turning, wearing down with every rotation”.
The concluding section, “BECOMING GODHOOD,” marks a physical change in the book, shifting in tone and introducing the last stage of simpson’s metamorphosis. The section’s increasingly darker grey pages, as well as the thick fragmented lines that cross the pages of poem “changeling,” signal a shift; simpson’s self-divinization in these final poems breaks an expectation that their poetry is only about loss. There is loss, grief, anger and sadness in these final poems, absolutely, but it is overtaken by simpson’s passionate celebration of her own intimacies and femininity.
a body more tolerable refuses to make itself singular, in tone, style or subject. jaye simpson is grieving and sexual, heartbroken with the power to kill gods. She addresses herself with passion in the last lines, addressing that she is “a body worthy of her divinity.” She writes herself out of a perception of being monstrous, and into a subject who addresses her reader with desire, with “want,” balancing this with deep mourning also present in these poems.
Bios
Meg Collins
Meg Collins (she/they) is a freelance journalist and poet from Ottawa, and temporarily living on unceded Ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people in San Francisco, California. Their work has previously been published in the Dalhousie Gazette, Fathom Literary Journal, Gideon Poetry Review, and Arts Help magazine. Meg is currently working on a series about zines and zine creators in the Bay Area for Arts Help magazine. They think that both poetry and DIY culture allow people to break apart language and reform it to imagine new political and social possibilities.