Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don't wash.

by Samuel Ace, Ari Banias (Contributor), Cameron Awkward-Rich (Contributor)

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. MEET ME THERE is a paired republication of Normal Sex (Firebrand Books, 1994) and Home in three days. Don't wash. (Hard Press, 1996). In the present edition, the texts are accompanied by a new introduction and poem by Samuel Ace, and by a collection of short essays and reflections on Ace and Smukler's poetics. MEET ME THERE brings together Ace/Smukler's remarkable explorations of the interplay of language, desire, sex, and identity, and repositions this work, 25 years later, in the midst of burgeoning contemporary conversations about gender, sexuality, sociality, language, politics, and poetics. MEET ME THERE is the third work in Belladonna*'s Germinal Texts Series, which seeks to trace feminist avant-garde histories and the poetic lineages they produce.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, Transgender, LGBT

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Samuel Ace (formerly Linda Smukler) is a trans and genderqueer author of three collections of poetry: Normal Sex, Home in three days. Don’t wash., and most recently Stealth, with poet Maureen Seaton. He is also a visual artist and is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, a two-time finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and the National Poetry Series, winner of the Astraea Lesbian Writer’s Fund Prize in Poetry, The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry. His work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in or is forthcoming from Poetry, Aufgabe, Fence, The Atlas Review, Black Clock, Mandorla, Versal, The Collagist, Posit, Vinyl, Troubling the Line: Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, Best American Experimental Poetry 2016, and many other publications.

Reviews

[Julene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE this book! First, I knew Linda Smukler years ago in the 1970s, we were in a writing group together and I loved her writing. Then we lost touch. But her writing stayed in my mind and in a folder in my files.

Every once and a while I did a web search, so I knew when these books came out, but for some reason I did not get them. Then I found Linda as Samuel Ace, and connected through Facebook. And now Samuel Ace has brought Linda Smukler's words back to us, as well as a dialogue between their two selves, the Linda that was the Samuel that is now, and how they have interrelated all these years from childhood.

What a beauty of a book. He starts with letters written back and forth between Linda and Samuel, then Linda's two books, then essays from other contemporary trans writers and people who knew Linda like Joan Nestle, the founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, who I also knew. Thrilled at this hybrid poetry history that sheds so much life on the trans experience.

Linda decided to transition in 1994. He now does word and sound poetry. Linda did prose poems, dense and rich with lots of sex. I am enthralled to read this book, to find the underlying emotions exposed. To hear the analysis from Cameron Awkward-Rich that, "we might think of trans as a particular practice of imagination, a reparative retreat into an expanded inner territory and an insistence that the life of the interior, "where I am the center," is a real life." (Using a quote from Linda's writing in Normal Sex.)

We are in a new world, and it has been coming to us through history starting with any outsider. From the Beats to the Hippies to the Queers to the Trans. They are the ones who bring change. This book is a harbinger of change addressed in the best possible ways through one being who has spent a lifetime finding their true self and fighting for it through words and experience.

I am grateful Samuel is back in my life (even if only through Facebook and his work) and exposing what Joan Nestle calls, "the human experience of time, the histories of selves." Joan says at the end of her essay, "...the ability to love beyond the borders maybe the only thing that saves us." Samuel himself confesses to Linda in one of his essays, “I went off searching for you because newly transforming, I was utterly unmoored. Linda, I did not want to be a man. I wanted to be free." May we all find such freedom.

[maren · Rating 4 out of 5]

when I try to pray my fingers are your fingers on the back of my neck

— —

kay gabriel writes that sam “gets his fingers slick and lodges them under your nose” & phew! yeah! “wake up and smell shit and heaven” hell yeah!

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems took my breath away. The intensity of their desire (esp. in Home in three days. Don't wash.) is hot hot hot and often quite brutal. This new joint edition includes a moving introduction -- letters between Sam and Linda -- and a range of short essays at the back by peers and descendants from Eileen Myles and Pamela Sneed to Cameron Awkward-Rich and Andrea Lawlor.

[Mia · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite part of this collection was actually the introduction. It's how I first came to learn of Samuel Ace—he read excerpts from some of these letters at a publishing conference I attended a few years ago, and I was so struck by their beauty and introspection. I loved the concept of writing to a past self and that past self responding back; it was part seance, part love story, part eulogy, and has stuck in my mind since.

The poems in this book are not nearly as tender as the Linda/Sam letters that precede them. Or rather, their tenderness is buried under ferocity. If I had to sum up Meet Me There in one phrase, it would be: "the brutality of desire." The running theme seems to be the lengths we go to feel more alive, more connected, and the ways that is thwarted. I really enjoyed how Smukler/Ace writes about sexual dominance and the way gender dynamics play into fantasies about power exchange—it felt visceral, and authentic in how desire becomes tangled up with upbringing and relationships. But I was left bored by the repetition of the other poems about sex: lots of cheating, lots of sensory details about strapons and anal sex, lots of forceful yearning, after a while it felt like I was reading the same poem over and over again.

More than anything, I'm intrigued by this as a deliberate resurrection on Ace's part. And so I'm curious to read his more recent work!

[Levi · Rating 4 out of 5]

i liked this book a lot. it’s a republication of two books written by Linda Smukler in the 90s who later transitioned and is now Sam Ace. They are both listed as coauthors of the book, and the book begins with letters between them. Ace and Smukler discuss everything from identity to poetry to time and back round again.

The two books, Normal Sex and Home in three days. Don’t wash., are experimental and borderless in a way that is undeniably trans. Reading them, you can see the breadcrumbs (and often, whole loaves) of a person grappling with genderqueerness. It’s beautiful and interesting to read the poems and know how the story ends even when the author herself did not.

What I love most about this book is that it is unapologetic about trans / lesbian sex and desire. Some poems are disgusting, but so too is the erotic. Too often, lesbian sex is either for men, or sanitized beyond recognition. But here dyke desire is presented in all of its multifaceted and disgusting glory.

some of the poems weren’t really for me, and i didn’t always love the style, but this book is deeply important trans lit, and will stay with me.

[lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

a beautifully edited and compiled volume— the raucous and breathless and raunchy and honest poems framed by thoughtful dialogue between the author & his past self, and by thoughtful criticism from other trans poets. the kind of poems i wish i could write, i will be returning to this volume again & again

[ally · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is my all-time favorite book

read it

[max · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been a long time since a text spoke to me so viscerally about desire, self, and dreaming things into existence. So so so good, and love the bonus odes to Sam Ace essays at the end

[Gwen · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5