Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Nonbinary Bird of Paradise

Nonbinary Bird of Paradise

Phillips, Emilia

Paperback

Series: Akron Poetry

Poetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1629222763
ISBN13: 9781629222769
Publisher: University of Akron Press
Published: Apr 2 2024
Pages: 95
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.39 Width: 5.98 Depth: 8.82
Language: English
Nonbinary Bird of Paradise shakes its tail feathers, reveling in a body that cannot be contained in gender binaries. Its opening sequence re-imagines the Judaeo-Christian Eve as a queer person who, instead of eating of the proverbial forbidden fruit, conjures a femme lover: God made man / in his own image, / so they say. / So I made a beloved / in mine, she says. Eve's power triggers a jealous God to manipulate Adam toward behaviors of toxic masculinity and to exile the two humans from the Garden of Eden. This retelling, accompanied by other retellings of classical and biblical narratives, indicts the ways in which religion and myth have created and buttressed compulsory heterosexuality. Elsewhere in the collection, Phillips delights in the autobiography of their imagination, the rendering of self after self after self. Would you stay // & watch me, Phillips asks in the titular poem, wondering if the beloved will deem them desirable, even though they are masculine without being a man, even / though / I have no blue velvet / skirt or ruby-raw / throat?

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