Description
Poetry. Native American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. This long-awaited volume collects poetry from the 80s and 90s by Max Wolf Valerio, one of the first trans poets to publish a book of poems in the US. The punk intensity, provocation, and playful, taboo stretching of perceptions in Valerio's poetry will be familiar to readers of his influential transition memoir The Testosterone Files.
"As I'm reading THE CRIMINAL I can remember the enormous impression Max Wolf Valerio made on entering a room—it was like some container of doom had found the nearest mic and was going to start to make demands, to radiate, to detonate, then move on... you went to see his readings as one in France might see Genet or Guyotat give their takes of the current situation—with a chill up one's spine. As though Francis Bacon wrote poems."—Kevin Killian, from the Introduction
"THE CRIMINAL by Max Wolf Valerio is an abrasive ballet that transposes the abyss tethered by nothing other than the energy of the urgent. Each line sired by hybridity, by the body as a liminal ark that exists as a scripture on inversion, all the while existing as the danger that suffuses this inversion. These poems seem to rage as destination via elliptical compass points, via inner inebriation and balance, magnetized as they are to a nutritional psychic gulf teeming with morphological brilliance."—Will Alexander
Author Bio
Max Wolf Valerio is an iconoclastic poet and writer, and a long-transitioned man of transsexual history. He identifies primarily as an individual although his ancestry is Northern European, American Indian (Blackfoot Confederacy- Blood/Kainai band) on his mother's side, and his father is Hispano from Northern New Mexico and descended from the Conversos and crypto-Jews of the Sephardic diaspora following the Expulsion. A chapbook Animal Magnetism (eg press) appeared in 1984. He read and performed his poems to music and in featured readings in San Francisco throughout the 70s and 80s at places like Intersection for the Arts, CoLab, Valencia Tool and Die, the San Francisco Art Institute, and The Marshall Weber Gallery (now ATA). Recent poetry includes: "Exile: Vision Quest at the Edge of Identity"—a long poem set to ambient music and excerpted in Yellow Medicine Review and made possible by a Native American Arts and Cultural Traditions Grants (NAACT) from the San Francisco Arts Commission; a collaboration with photographer and painter Dana Smith, Mission Mile Trilogy +1; poems in the anthology TROUBLING THE LINE: TRANS AND GENDERQUEER POETRY AND POETICS (Nightboat Books, 2013). His memoir, The Testosterone Files (Seal Press, 2006) was a Lambda Finalist for 2006. His latest book of poetry is THE CRIMINAL: THE INVISIBILITY OF PARALLEL FORCES (EOAGH Books, 2019).
Author City: DENVER, CO USA