day/break

day/break, poet Gwen Benaway’s fourth collection of work, explores the everyday poetics of the trans feminine body. Through intimate experiences and conceptualizations of trans life, day/break asks what it means to be a trans woman, both within the text and out in the physical world. Shifting between theory and poetry, Benaway questions how gender, sexuality, and love intersect with the violence and transmisogyny of the nation state and established literary institutions. In beautiful lyric verse, day/break reveals the often-unseen other worlds of trans life, where body, self, and sex are transformed, becoming more than fixed binary locations.

AUTHOR

Gwen Benaway

GWEN BENAWAY is the author of various poetry collections, including day/break and Holy Wild, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, and which was also a finalist for various awards such as the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. She has been a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Writers from the Writers’ Trust of Canada, and her personal essay, “A Body Like a Home,” was the Gold Prize Winner for the National Magazine Awards in Personal Journalism. She lives in Toronto, Ontario, and is a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto in the Women and Gender Studies Institute.