A Place Called No Homeland

February 26, 2018
This thought-provoking, beautiful, and painstakingly candid poetic debut follows Thom’s first novel, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir. The collection consists mostly of one- to two-page poems rich in sensory detail, from sun-dried orange peel candy and red bean paste buns described in the opening poem to the knuckle-against-bone descriptions of violence and abuse that come later. Thom meditates on points of origin, some literal (Vancouver is seen in “downtown beastside”) and others figurative: “our beauty is a secret that stands up to scream,/our beauty is becoming and becoming.” Thom is hyperaware yet simultaneously serene about the limited time of each life, unafraid to acknowledge that there will be a future after she and her readers are gone. She takes on hypocrisy within LGBTQ community (in “queer tribe”), being othered versus embracing otherness (in “its name was the Boy Without a Penis”), and storytelling itself (in “book fetish”). Nightclubs serve as second homes, mythology and ancestry inform the urban present, and the racism that is lurking all over is called out. In Thom’s work, queerness is sensational but not sensationalized, and beauty, memory and desire are done right, sublime in their specificity.