Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Transit
    Transit
    Transit
    Ebook48 pages22 minutes

    Transit

    By Cameron Awkward-Rich

    4.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Cameron Awkward-Rich's Transit, runner-up for the 2014 Button Poetry Prize, takes the reader on a constantly surprising journey through gender and identity in contemporary America. Awkward-Rich's academic prowess shines throughout, as does his remarkable ability to condense an essay's worth of thought and theory into a few poignant lines. A book to be read anywhere and everywhere: in a classroom, on the subway, under blankets on a cold winter night.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherButton Poetry
    Release dateMar 21, 2020
    ISBN9781943735174
    Transit
    Author

    Cameron Awkward-Rich

    Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of the chapbook TRANSIT (Button Poetry, 2015), and the collection SYMPATHETIC LITTLE MONSTER (Ricochet Editions, 2015), which was named a finalist for the National Poetry Series. He is a Cave Canem Fellow, on staff at Muzzle Magazine, and currently a doctoral candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. Price: $12.00

    Related to Transit

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Devil Asks Why You Would Mouth The Word Pity

      Jul 1, 2022

      even in this abundance of dark? Even in this abundance of dark you have totake the stars on faith. Look: Under today’s dim sky there is a basket.In that basket there is a fish. Come night, you are the animal that will eat the best parts of it. And ye

      1 min read

    • Article

      Six Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2021

      Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants somethingfrom me, but, well, everybody wants something and nobody wantsnothing from me, goldenrod, towhead, beast. Goldenrod, you packthe meadows like gold-plated sardines. I have heart palpitationsbu

      3 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      I’ve seen enough films where a character nickshimself shaving or maybe has a bread knife slip and the thinrun of blood is supposed to stand for some violence,for something he did and is desperateto cover up, but the truth will out—I’ve seen enough th

      2 min read

    • Article

      All The Gay Saints

      May 1, 2020

      All The Gay Saints
      4 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Mar 15, 2022

      a ghost is hangingfrom the doorpostof our past— can you see it?it has wounds—it’s bleedingyears from its mouth [.] when we left ourhouses that aprilit was for history’s pleasure— twice the war wasin far-flung townsthen it grew a light foot and veered

      1 min read

    • Article

      Thirteen

      Jan 30, 2020

      Thirteen
      21 min read

    • Article

      The Wanders: When home is not a haven.

      Jul 25, 2013

      The job in the North was a good job for what it was. I was not excited about it, but I was satisfied because it would take me away from the city where I had lived with Paul, and where every drugstore and bar and credit center was heavy with the memor

      13 min read

    • Article

      My Life (second Draft)

      Feb 28, 2023

      It’s early again, and I can hear the train, many miles away, running along the edge of the bay. Since there is no other ambient noise, it is as clear as if it were just down the hill. Until he was born and got older and began to talk all the time abo

      23 min read

    • Article

      Diary, 1988

      Mar 15, 2022

      On November 16, 1989, I phoned the Soviet embassy in Paris and asked to speak to Mr. S. The switchboard operator did not reply. After a long silence, a woman’s voice said: “You know, Mr. S. returned to Moscow yesterday.” I immediately hung up. I felt

      17 min read

    • Article

      Changing Our Narratives through ‘Days of Our Lives’

      Oct 17, 2018

      1. Just weeks before the presidential election, after the release of the recording in which Donald Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women as he headed to the set of Days of Our Lives, my mother called me. While most people talked about the wor

      5 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2024

      I’ve always been an easy crier (let it come, not ashamed, never held it back in joy or grief, and wherever … subway, teaching, grocery store, (oh the desolate grocery store during the height of Covid) but now, the welling up: that’s daily now. —Lia P

      5 min read

    • Article

      After “The End”

      Oct 10, 2022

      I walked down the road with a hunched back and a wet cigarette in my mouth—the fire had died a while back. My hands were tucked into the pockets of my jacket, and my hair fell over my face, limiting my sight. But I wasn’t really seeing where I was go

      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Transit

    4.5/5

    15 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Oh my God! If you’re looking for something to tear you all the way apart, then this is the book for you. I read it in one breathless sitting.

    Book preview

    Transit - Cameron Awkward-Rich

    Blues

    ONCE

         you wanted to be beautiful

    so rooted in your wet

    dropped the seeds down

    there & waited

    to become a forest of sun

    flowers grown huge

    as your mother

    until you opened

    your jaw & a tiny stone

    spilled out

    ESSAY ON THE THEORY OF MOTION

    You remember reading a poem about a boy driving his grandmother to the library across town. Someone said that the car is a perfect device for giving a poem the feeling of motion, though you think the two must end up back at the grandmother’s house eventually, must walk hallways lined with family ghosts, all smiling through the window of a photograph & is that motion, really? This tendency to cross & recross the small terms of our own lives?

    //

    They expect me to talk about Newton. Fine. An object at rest stays at rest. An object in motion stays in motion. Friction has many names — it’s no surprise that when the train stops, so do you.

    //

    What else is true? You beg each thing to answer. You make mouths for the answer to crawl through. You bite the inside of your cheek. You paint the world red all the way through.

    //

    I’m only kidding. You can’t expect everything to speak your language. To use these new mouths for what you imagine mouths are for. After all, you make a mouth on your upper thigh, the doctor calls it a wound, your dumb hands at work again. You can’t get your body to tell the secret. Can’t get it to tell you anything at all.

    //

    Anyway, you’ve begun to suspect that theory is less movement toward truth & more movement through a series of puns.

    For example, a queer theorist—you don’t know who,

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1