by Mikal Wix
August 2, 2023
Mikal Wix is a queer writer who lives in the American South. Their work can be read in Corvus Review, Peregrine Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Roi Fainéant Press, decomp journal, Olit, Queerlings, Door = Jar, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. As an old science editor, associate poetry editor, & holder of grad degree in creative writing, they collect literary anthologies from bygone eras to help keep vigil.
Binded by H Warren; Red Hen Press; 80 pages; $17.95
Binded is H Warren’s debut poetry collection from Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press. From the first word, the forthright will of the Alaskan writer glows with the power of change. The past tense of the verb, to bind, which is bound, is purposefully misconjugated here as binded. The purposive nature of this ‘error’ illustrates from the outset that these poems will not comply with any rules, particularly any prohibitions against the freedom to determine one’s selfhood, expression, or destiny. All restrictions or constraints, whether figurative or literal, are questioned or subverted if they challenge the engine of transformative change inherent in these poetics.
As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex in 1949, “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” Nearly three-quarters of a century later, the trans-poetics of 2023 reveal that the war is still raging for control over our individual identities and bodies. Mme de Beauvoir wrote that “the problem of woman has always been a problem of men.” Warren updates these enlightenments by foregrounding the discourse around gender as one of the battleground’s front lines. The power to control one’s expression of gender and to choose who we love are central to the poems in Binded: “Binded sir / Binded man / Binded when I exchange my comfort for your comfort.” Their poems reflect the critical and essential narratives in which queer and nonbinary people strive to carve out healthy, thriving lives in the face of heteronormative presumptions and the many corrosive and debilitating restraints and attacks by individual and institutional voices, all incessantly feeding a dark age of black-and-white politics and unrestrained violence.
When they cast their lyrical eye upon these named and unnamed people and places, from close family members to presidents of nations, Warren doesn’t flinch. The poems expose them all to the revelatory scream of confessional verse and the excoriating testimony of the wrongfully convicted. In the poem, “Mother’s Day,” the speaker chooses the phrase “unconditional birth” as opposed to unconditional love, an aphoristic if not cliché expression of the bond. In choosing the word birth, however, the relationship is exposed to be less of a choice than perhaps a natural profundity, but one from which less attachment might follow beyond the expected formality. And in “Oil and Ice,” the governmental oversight of both immigration and energy policies collide to cut the underbelly of those people least prepared to manage the sundering repercussions, of environmental degradation, of families destroyed, of cruelty prevailing: “destruction made great again.” Warren takes no prisoners in these lines and explicitly pins the villains with their lightless awards. “P is for pacification / peacekeeping in perpetual / process of oppression / appeasing the loudest bigot in his pew” from the poem, “Anti-Bathroom Bill: A Poem with P” is one such award.
These arresting poems are superb. The thematic core of the book is centered on the mechanisms of survival, but not just the trans-survival of nonbinary and queer people. Binded pulls back the curtain on the further ramifications for all of us if the selfish politics and unbridled brutality are allowed to continue. “Maybe the true pandemic / is the loss / of a compassionate lens,” from “Dispatch from Alaska,” a poem near the end of the book. The speaker in the poem suggests that the recent pandemic provides a lighthouse view of what’s to come by boldly pointing out that the real losses we endured and will endure, beyond the loss of loved ones, are already manifest all around us in the forms of homelessness, starvation, ignorance, bigotry, discrimination, fear, and inhumanity.
In his book, Image, Music, Text, Roland Barthes wrote, “Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.” In this sense, the interpretive responsibility for the poems falls to us. Warren’s poetry evokes the power of the shaman or shamanka, a mediator who can perform the verses and carry their weight into the future. Barthes wrote that “it is language that speaks, not the author.” The poems in the collection form a set of marching orders for us to complete. The suffering of the speakers in Binded is not exclusively owned by them, but in fact these pains are as universal as they should be unnecessary. The struggle to become is our struggle, too. In “Buying Clothes,” a speaker states, “the measurement of looking too fem / looking too butch / reminds me of a safety pin / unable to clasp two forms of being.” Thus, it’s incumbent on the audience of these poems to bear witness to the process of becoming, of imagining and re-imagining ourselves, and the often-monumental obstacles to overcome, particularly among nonbinary and queer bodies in rural spaces.
In the poem, “What Will I Name Myself,” the act of creation through imagination is read into the record: “I imagine / all of this imagining / will define me.” And in “Your Resistance to My Transition,” the speaker of the poem insists, “When I tell you I am transitioning / what I mean is / I am always in transition.” Warren gives us the language from which to read, listen, and construct new citadels, like being provided the brick and mortar to build and protect queer and nonbinary identities. As Mme Beauvoir wrote, “Only the mediation of another can constitute an individual as an Other.” Binded offers us the chance to see directly into the process of designing and assembling identity, including all the dangerous and tragic circumstances and consequences. As readers, we choose what might come next from our understanding of the poetry. In the poem, “Grabbed in a Bathroom,” the speaker unselfconsciously replies to Mme Beauvoir: “As woman / I knew hypervigilance / as nonbinary / I know it even more.” And in this single statement, the lived awareness of the trans-survival experience is shared.
The poetry of Binded is at once both unique and familiar. Each poem builds on the next in a layering of experiential knowledge earned by injury to the body, distress to the mind, and sorrow to the soul. Yet, running beneath them all is the rubric for empathy and compassion. If one wants to understand how best to discover the nature of mercy inside us all, one need only read these poems. Binded is an authentic and fierce reproach of our human flaws, but it’s also a petition for our human bonds to reach out to one another without the injunction of fear.
©2023 Iron Oak Editions LLC
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The Brinksmanship of Premeditated Irregularity in H Warren's Binded
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