Nonbinary Bird of Paradise

by Emilia Phillips

Nonbinary Bird of Paradise shakes its tail feathers, reveling in a body that cannot be contained in gender binaries. Its opening sequence re-imagines the Judaeo-Christian Eve as a queer person who, instead of eating of the proverbial forbidden fruit, conjures a femme lover: “God made man / in his own image, / so they say. / So I made a beloved / in mine,” she says. Eve’s power triggers a jealous God to manipulate Adam toward behaviors of toxic masculinity and to exile the two humans from the Garden of Eden. This retelling, accompanied by other retellings of classical and biblical narratives, indicts the ways in which religion and myth have created and buttressed compulsory heterosexuality. Elsewhere in the collection, Phillips delights in the autobiography of their imagination, the rendering of self after self after self. “Would you stay // & watch me,” Phillips asks in the titular poem, wondering if the beloved will deem them desirable, even though they are masculine without being a man, “even / though / I have no blue velvet / skirt or ruby-raw / throat?”

Genres: Poetry, Transgender, LGBT

95 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2024

About the author

Emilia Phillips is the author of a previous collection, Signaletics (University of Akron Press, 2013), and three chapbooks, most recently Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike (Bull City Press, 2015). She's received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop, U.S. Poets in Mexico, and Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry and lyric essays have appeared in Agni, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Centenary College of New Jersey and the 32 Poems interviews editor.

Reviews

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part liturgical analysis, part archive of dyke trans becoming, trauma, and light notes of southern / religious trauma. This book has many striking moments, from the opening “books” following queer, defiant Eve, to more inward-focused contemporary set of poems addressing the author’s own relationship to spirituality and trans subjectivity.

[Maddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nonbinary authored poetry >>>>

(Thank you to the publisher for my copy!)

[Skylar Miklus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Lambda Award-nominated poetry collection was my read for the first day of the Sealey Challenge and it was a strong way to start out! The book begins powerfully with breathtaking long poem "The Queerness of Eve," which subverts the Biblical story of creation and elevates to transcendent queer desire. A particularly strong sequence of poems in the middle takes the perspective of Noah's wife during the Biblical tale of the great flood, a mournful song. But Phillips' poems often take on a humorous tone too, dancing between the lines of gender with playful syntax. I also liked the inclusion of formal elements such as end-rhyme, anaphora, internal rhyme, and received structures. My favorite poem was probably the tender, funny "Because 'Lesbian Elephants' Is So Pleasurable to Say."