Sympathetic Little Monster

by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Poetry. African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Through a combination of lyric, narrative, & fractured essay, SYMPATHETIC LITTLE MONSTER attempts to make a space & a shape for the little girl who haunts our cultural/ personal narratives about blackness & transmasculinity. As a trans coming-of-age text the work is intensely inward- focused, but it resists the imperative of linear autobiography. Instead, it uses the personal as a tool to explore what kind of thing a "self" is, its relation to trauma & objectification, & its capacity to be multiple.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Transgender, Memoir, Queer Lit, College

74 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2016

About the author

Cameron Awkward-Rich is a poet and a scholar of trans theory/expressive culture. Awkward-Rich received his B.A. in English and Biology from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. His writing and teaching creatively combine trans/feminist/queer theory, disability studies, black studies, and poetry and other forms of experimental writing to explore transgender aesthetics and cultural production, the conflicted histories of trans/feminist/queer thought in the U.S., and collective affect/feeling.

Presently, he is an associate professor in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Reviews

[Rowan]

Every. Goddamn. Word. In. This. Book. Makes. Me. Want. To. Sing.

[Marne Wilson]

These are delicate poems about transformation and metamophosis. My favorite lines, from “Ars Poetica”: “I don’t trust anyone/ who has never learned the person can’t be separated// from the rot.”

[m]

Probably one of my favourite books of contemporary poetry I’ve ever read tbh

[Jonathan]

Such poetic excellence on display here

[Bogi Takács]

Awesome and very cohesive poetry collection, with a strong sense of ambience; I want to write a longer review later with some quotes too.
____
Source of the book: Bought with my own money

[Rivka Yeker]

Sympathetic Little Monster speaks to the childhood self. It doesn't invalidate the childhood self's experience, nor does it eliminate the pain. It just sits with it. It says, "you existed and now I exist -- and we can co-exist, even if it hurts sometimes." Not a mourning, maybe a reckoning.

A beautiful book, one that reopened my heart and left me feeling raw and simultaneously at peace.

[Noura]

I wanted to say that I loved this because Cameron Awkward-Rich is one of my favorite poets but I just couldn't. It was missing something for me and I can't put my finger as to what that thing is.

Still, I will continue reading all his work because this didn't curb my love for them.

[Curtis]

This book was so unsuspecting; I found it on a little neglected poetry shelf in an Oxfam bookshop, with an understated cover and not much going for it. But, appearances can be deceiving.

Awkward-Rich has produced a wonderful bouquet of poetry that he lays on the gravestone of his past selves. In doing so, we read a heart-felt yet haunting collection on transmutation and self-mourning, which blossoms into a gracious homage to queerness. He continues to trace his fingers over his blackness, his heritage, whilst simultaneously dethorning experiences of familial trauma and relationships.

“Isn’t that what a poem does—studies a thing with two hundred faces then severs all but one?” Awkward-Rich says it perfectly; his poetry is a study of the many-headed complexity of identity, and yet in it all, there remains a single solitary voice: Awkward-Rich. A true poet.

[Emilie Guan]

NEW FAVORITE OF ALL TIME
absolutely unbelievable as a poetry collection.

“She enters the machinery of the closet. She goes
through the motions of prayer. A rush of blood
& the membrane shakes loose. Now, she is a
new kind of monster, a new kind of child. Of
course, the story ends with the loyal hand of
gravity, fresh rug burn rouging her cheeks. She
knows there has always been a word for
something like transcendence—the soul, the id, the
cloud, Being untethered by the dark. But walk into
the world of dreams & what rises into the surface
is always just the world: a mother buying a box
of Corn Flakes. A boy entering the bedroom &
leaving a layer of himself behind. The little girl
takes nothing but what is given. She wants to
be a sealed room in a kingdom of rooms. To join
the mute divinity of things.”

[Elaine]

im just a gay lil monster

[Ilana Moyer]

SUCH a beautiful, accessible collection of trans-centered poetry.

[Diana Marie Denza]

I first heard Cameron Awkward-Rich read from Sympathetic Little Monster at the 2019 Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival, and knew I had to buy the book. This collection is deeply profound because it conveys, without muddled or overly-complex language, what it means to be queer, black, and trans in a world that doesn't always understand or acknowledge these identities. Two highlights in the collection were "The Child Formerly Known As____" and "Essay on the Appearance of Ghosts." Read this collection!

[thalia]

I will re read this again and again. What a curious, tense, and honest breath of new life into narrative, poetry, and theory. Thank you Awkward-Rich. (Also I have a feeling Awkward-Rich would be an amazing comedy writer as well. Some of the poems’ honest walked on the important tragic end of what seemed to have glimpses of genuine joy and humor— think for example the first poem on airports).

[Em]

This text is rich and amazing. I read it in one sitting, but read each entry multiple times. I feel like I need to read it again and after a month to give it a proper review because all I can do is think of its brilliance.

[willowdog]

These are lyrical poems of story-like images of transition girl to boy. Interesting, yet found them cold. We are looking from afar.

[Laura Corin]

ugh. so good. read. repeat.

[J]

Oh, this hit home, lol.

[Jasper Kuliński]

*“(Let’s get the obvious out of the
way—you were a girl & then you
weren’t. You moved into a boy & the
girl moved into misplaced language,
into photographs.)” (7)

*Entirety of “Bridge” (9-10)

“Don’t misunderstand. I don’t hate white people. Nothing here resembles hate, or freedom from hate. Love, after all, is all you need” (22)

“We haven’t made it to the punch line.
Everyone is waiting. Everyone wants
resolution, for the poem to click shut. Who
gets the last word? Who, in the end, dictates
the story? I’m sorry. I really don’t know” (24)

Entirety of “The World of Things” (25)

“If a boy pins her to the ground, if he empties the air from her chest, he will call it a game. If she pins the boy, if she holds his shoulders in her hands, if she wants to fill him, all the boys who see will call her names, but never her own. She suspects this has something to do with pronouns, or the way she comes to school a rosebush & no one calls her a faggot. Either way, it’s a distance made of language & no one will look a girl with questions in the eye” (26)

“Each year, I think I have finally outgrown youth’s obligatory madness. Swear to never fall in love again with a hand that always gives me what I ask for. But there’s someone on fire in the attic & no one knows how she got there or where she came from…I think I was glad we’d driven to Virginia & fought the whole way. I think I owe you an apology, I think I must have loved you, I keep rewriting this story—who are you? A bird? Or a boy? Or an image of a boy with frantic wings, trying to outrun my changing weather?” (35)

“Memory, too, is a problem of language. To call you my friend? My wife? My love, my editor, my pet? I don’t know. Already you move hazy through my life & then out of it again” (37)

*Entirety of “OOO” (40)


“Somewhere, his hands part a girl

where she is most like the ocean.
His hands dictate the rising tide
of that full and furious

moon” (41)


Entirety of “You Load the Needle & Do Not Cry as It Passes Through You. You Take the Pills & Never Cry Again.” (43-45)


*“I think her grief moved

into my father when he was born & into his daughters when we were born & I’m sure someone’s tried

to tell you the blues is only music, but the radio
the radio” (46)


*“Sure, I’ve been opened the way girls are opened.
Sure, I’ve gone missing in the dark.

Sure, I’ve looked at my sister & seen a woman
caught in flames. But we have pills for that.

We have money for pills for that.

//

Please—

what’s the word for being born of sorrow
that isn’t yours? For having a family?

For belonging nowhere? Not even
your body. Especially not there” (47)


Entirety of “Essay Amending the Nature of my Mother’s Tears” (48)

*Entirety of “The Child Formerly Known As ________” (50-51)


“No one wants to hear that
no love, no prayer, no tool of god
could ever scrape them clean.

When you say things like that people think
you’re just in love with sadness & it’s true
but aren’t we all in love with things we know

will kill us? & when you say things like that
people think there is some medicine or word
to save you. Everyone is always trying

to fill me with something other than myself” (56)


Entirety of “Theory of Motion (4), Nocturne” (57-58)

“Language was invented; who knows when. But it’s true the first writing was image. A picture of a slaughtered animal standing in for the animal. Such melancholic technology—mark a loss & therefore avoid it. Remake the world as wreckage & leave it somehow unchanged. Pay attention. What is an alphabet but a way to give sounds little bodies? What is writing but the preservation of ghosts?” (65)

[Ulyera]

I find it hard to engage with queer theory - not because I find it a topic too theoretically dense and complex, or because I do not identify myself with queer identities (I do). It is hard for me because of the explicit sexual nature of queer theory. Not merely attraction, but the eroticized zones of the human body. I can conceptualize the queer body in society, but ask me to send my gaze lower, and suddenly the air is too hot and the words will not come out of my mouth.

In my second semester of grad school, my professor asked me personally what I looked for in a relationship. I must preface this by saying he did not ask me this in any inappropriate scenario, but to characterize my reading of a piece about sovereignty. I could not answer him because a) I don't know, and b) I cannot articulate what I want to say because I do not know what to say and further what I want. It was incredibly embarrassing. My cheeks flamed. My neck got really hot, and I wanted to look everywhere but at him.

So now I am taking a class, and we are spending our session explicitly talking about sex and gender and my professor has asked me to read something explicitly about sex and gender. She has also asked me to write a three-page response to the reading, and I have no clue where to start. How do I vocalize what I cannot even admit to myself?

Anyways. Poetry is an interesting form to play with in connection with theory. It is both anti and pro form, requesting the author to follow a scheme while simultaneously allowing for the deconstruction of said form. In the past, sonnets and iambic pentameters ruled the poetic form. Milton, Shakespeare, and Dante have ruled the genre for so long that anyone who is a poet that are not any of these three seems to be revolutionary.

Awkward-Rich approaches the genre unabashedly, dedicating whole pages to a couple of lines that are not constrained by the conventional forms of poetry. Further, his poetry is defined by the undefinable: the boy who takes his name out of the girl's mouth. He dedicates poems to his parents explicitly, and to masturbation and sex by implication. Central to his poetry is the recognition of pain - physical and emotional.

[Micol Mian]

Ho dovuto comprare questo libretto dagli Stati Uniti e aspettare più di un mese perché arrivasse e diverse delle poesie le avevo già lette in "Transit", eppure è valsa la pena per ogni singola parola. Comprese quelle ripetute.
Ci sono così tanti livelli di lettura - dalla transizione alla violenza razziale alla violenza di genere alla violenza della Modernità stessa («The story of modernity is a ghost story, after all») alla solitudine alla sessualità al dolore - e sono tutti perfettamente fusi in un discorso unico e coerente come può essere unica e coerente (e non esserlo al tempo stesso, per forza di cose) l'esperienza di un singolo individuo. Che porta dentro di sé innumerevoli fantasmi, di tutto ciò che è e non è stato.
Oltre alla bellezza struggente dei versi e dei simboli. Elettrici e sfaccettati. Intensissimi.

[Lucy]

Sings. This book absolutely sings. Every single poem in this collection is just heartbreakingly beautiful. The book is constructed beautifully---it's not just a grouping-together of poems, it is a true collection. Awkward-Rich's command of language and theory builds up this collection, and it can be read again and again and again.

5/5 stars

[Lauren]

Wow. Just, WOW.

[annie]

such an incredible book of poetry wow

[Kelly]

So good it almost hurts.

[Andrew]

Powerful writing, especially "The Child Formerly Known As ________."

[Simon]

So much, so powerful. Such delicate use of language to work with such rough feelings. I'll be coming back to this one, trying to take in more, learn from it.

[Kyli]

Read for ENGL 3331

[Leanna]

“All I found was this palmful of dust. Here. Take it. Throw her to the sky. Let her scatter & drift down. Let her coat your pink tongue”

[Nancy Zigler]

I really loved this poetry collection.

[Le]

So many good poems. So many that made me think, made me feel, made me read them over and over again.