The Great Good Time - Kaveney, Roz

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Résumé :
From the author of the Lambda Literary award-winning roman a clef, Tiny Piece of Skull, also available from Team Angelica Publishing, this chapbook is a passionate collection of highly personal poems by trans elder Roz Kaveney, most of them written in the white heat of the current moment of marked anti-trans hostility; others to mark Trans Day of Remembrance. From the foreword: In the autumn of 2021, well into the second year of Covid-19 and the start of the fifth year of the War On Trans, I noticed a lot of bleakness creeping into trans social media and thought it my job as a community elder to remind young people that things have been, if not worse, at least as bad in different ways. Back in the late '70s, when I transitioned, I acquired as my peer group a bunch of slightly younger trans women who I met around Soho, and for a short while became their landlady, bail person and wailing wall. I had middle class and educational privilege they didn't - I hope I used it for the greater good. It was - as much as my time in Chicago - the making of me. It taught me a lot about solidarity. And then we all moved on. Some of them died: some of them are still alive. The important thing about life in an embattled community is to have each other's backs.

Biographie:
Roz Kaveney has been actively committed to gay, feminist and trans politics since the early 1970s. She helped found Feminists against Censorship and was deputy chair of Liberty in the 90s - she is still an active voice in print and online journalism and in social media. Wearing other hats, she has written extensively on popular culture in books like Teen Dreams and Reading The Vampire Slayer, developing an informal theory about what she calls the sense of 'thick texts' - the idea that it is useful to read most works of art with a sense of context, the other works they might have been, the effect of influence and the means of cultural production. After abandoning poetry in her twenties, she returned to it in her late fifties, adopting an aggressive formalism as a way of queering the canon, writing poems on subjects excluded from the tradition by prejudice. Her first collection, Dialectic of the Flesh, has been shortlisted for awards including the Lambda. Well known for her sf reviewing, and for her involvement in a number of significant anthologies, she has returned to writing fiction - most recently, her epic fantasy sequence Rhapsody of Blood has received rave reviews in both the genre press and the mainstream. Roz grew up working-class, queer and temporarily Catholic in London and Wakefield; she is embarrassed at how totally she fits a particular 'got the memo in childhood' trans narrative. Active in left politics from her teens, she was foolish enough to delay transition until her late twenties. She works in publishing and as a literary journalist.