Them!

A Scotsman Poetry Book of the YearThem! by Harry Josephine Giles is an exuberant collection of poems about trans life as it is lived today, through the lenses of work, technology and ecology. In Them! Giles excavates the lexicon of sex and gender, singing back with irony, fury and possibility. The visual poetics of Them! create an unusually dynamic reading experience as she finds new ways ‘to sing, shout and strike in the cracks of what’s possible’. We hear from ‘the reasonable people’ and the bureaucrats; a bewildered worker contemplates the horrors of neoliberalism; a group of women at a quiet dinner encounter a punitive, spectral guest. Throughout, Giles weighs the artist’s need for reverie against the noise that surrounds the activist. How to be both? Must we set aside the struggle in order to create, or ‘to hear a bird’?‘Poetry’, writes Giles, ‘is the best way I know to magic the rage I feel into something more alive, and to offer that spark to others.’ Drawing on an abundance of influences with subversive wit, Them! is a zestful poetic intervention from one of this generation’s most necessary poets. ‘A bold and inimitable tour-de-force’ – Guardian