Direct Address is a memoir-in-verse of turning 21, of becoming your “own single mother” your first year of sobriety and transition—the year your mother succumbed to the alcoholism you inherited. Across couplets, sonnets, lyrics, and a central long poem, the lyric “you” blooms at the intersection of public and private life, of personal and political narrativity. In a moment when demagogues, bureaucrats, and pundits are threatening to drive transness out of public life entirely, Direct Address is an uncompromising document of perseverance, authenticity, and survival.
Advance praise for Direct Address
"I grew my tits in secret," writes Robin Arble in Direct Address. "My tits began/as an experiment." And this book is its own secret experiment-centered around its stunning long title poem, Direct Address is a complex, sharp-yet-sensitive song of trauma, family, love, transition, and where it all collides in our bodies and memories. Robin gracefully demonstrates how to build meaning out of the mess of life, and how to find a way forward.
-sterling-elizabeth arcadia, author of Transmasc Marvel Girl and Heaven, Ekphrasis
Shots and pixels and lacerations to the most mundane capitalist moments that hold our lives hostage, complicated relationships all around, and so many forms of names and naming and all of our rites of passage, Direct Address is a windfall for those of us who have felt life scrape too close to the bone. Robin's written siren song to the hard times, the times we must go through, and the times we come out alive, making it all worth it.
-Sarah Clark, co-editor of ALOCASIA: 99 queer writers on plants and nature
In Robin Arble's Direct Address, the body is both home and wrecking ground, both daughter and slaughter. How do you survive self-destruction through alcohol? How do you survive transitioning in a country bent on your demise? These poems navigate the answers, all the while grieving a "mother's life-long death." These are poems about no longer being "your father's son...your mother's son" that instead step into their wholeness, half-drunk but clear-eyed, into being "your daughter." But as much as Robin writes of self-destruction, this book is always concerned most importantly with survival. This is a book that boldly announces, "I kept living." I'm so glad she's here to tell us her story.
-William Fargason, author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara and Velvet
Release Date:
ISBN: 978-1-964932-33-0
44 pages
Direct Address is a memoir-in-verse of turning 21, of becoming your “own single mother” your first year of sobriety and transition—the year your mother succumbed to the alcoholism you inherited. Across couplets, sonnets, lyrics, and a central long poem, the lyric “you” blooms at the intersection of public and private life, of personal and political narrativity. In a moment when demagogues, bureaucrats, and pundits are threatening to drive transness out of public life entirely, Direct Address is an uncompromising document of perseverance, authenticity, and survival.
Advance praise for Direct Address
"I grew my tits in secret," writes Robin Arble in Direct Address. "My tits began/as an experiment." And this book is its own secret experiment-centered around its stunning long title poem, Direct Address is a complex, sharp-yet-sensitive song of trauma, family, love, transition, and where it all collides in our bodies and memories. Robin gracefully demonstrates how to build meaning out of the mess of life, and how to find a way forward.
-sterling-elizabeth arcadia, author of Transmasc Marvel Girl and Heaven, Ekphrasis
Shots and pixels and lacerations to the most mundane capitalist moments that hold our lives hostage, complicated relationships all around, and so many forms of names and naming and all of our rites of passage, Direct Address is a windfall for those of us who have felt life scrape too close to the bone. Robin's written siren song to the hard times, the times we must go through, and the times we come out alive, making it all worth it.
-Sarah Clark, co-editor of ALOCASIA: 99 queer writers on plants and nature
In Robin Arble's Direct Address, the body is both home and wrecking ground, both daughter and slaughter. How do you survive self-destruction through alcohol? How do you survive transitioning in a country bent on your demise? These poems navigate the answers, all the while grieving a "mother's life-long death." These are poems about no longer being "your father's son...your mother's son" that instead step into their wholeness, half-drunk but clear-eyed, into being "your daughter." But as much as Robin writes of self-destruction, this book is always concerned most importantly with survival. This is a book that boldly announces, "I kept living." I'm so glad she's here to tell us her story.
-William Fargason, author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara and Velvet
Release Date:
ISBN: 978-1-964932-33-0
44 pages
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