Notes

96 pages.
Contents: My tongue as rope -- the nonbinary individual -- fetal -- One of the great ocean-going canoes -- in the material body of the writer -- Con-ception -- We make just as much impact I would like to think -- Songs of an enby -- Glass breaking -- a phone call about the nature of pronouns gendered and otherwise -- The knot-boy -- The tree won't always be there to point at -- Koare -- Cough in -- Sensephemera -- to name a dead thing joshua -- I can't help the warmth -- I would hold you pooling -- detachment -- slice through thigh skin because people can't see thigh skin -- Have you gone out at night in your favourite dress and then felt like shit? -- passing as nobinary -- All the Eastern side beheld -- Kaimais -- she cut her face shaving -- not in my heart ha ha ha ha -- enby -- how to read the text -- bridge(t) -- No Ulysses -- A sound I can't spell -- Holding rights to -- Are you seeing your own death and selling it to me -- Us as meat hitting meat -- the sparkle in ur eyes versus my dysphoria -- Chemicals in our bodies -- My oestrogen surreal -- Marketing for the fucking Koch family -- The scientist observing the wreckage they are in -- Supercritical fluid chromatography -- The great sleeping god of just-sounds -- To get out -- The thread of black red and white -- takatāpui.
Summary: In ransack, essa may ranapiri addresses the difficulty of assembling and understanding a fractured, unwieldy self through an inherited language - a language whose assumptions and expectations ultimately make it inadequate for such a task. These poems seek richer, less hierarchical sets of words to describe ways of being. Punctuated by a sequence of letters to Virginia Woolf's character Orlando, this immersive collection is about discovering, articulating, and defending - to oneself and to others - what it means to exist outside of the western gender binary, as takatapui. It describes an artist in a state of becoming, moving from Te Kore through Te Po and into the light. (Back cover)