Impossible Things

Impossible Things is a book of poems considering fatherhood through the lens of transgender and Jewish identity with a focus on the impact of generational trauma. These poems (accompanied by two short essays) explore the way that the loss of a single child can reverberate for generations. Largely through the lens of the lyric, Impossible Things consider the author’s experiences as a transgender child and father, reflecting on his fraught relationship with his own father, who died in 2006. Weaving in passages from the poet’s father’s unpublished memoir in the form of erasure poems, Impossible Things presents a fractured and incomplete memoir, as it engages with the mysterious drowning of the poet’s brother, Joshua, at age two, a tragedy that cast a shadow over his childhood. By using forms such as the cento, which builds a poem from a patchwork of voices, these poems embrace intertextuality beyond their relationship with the author’s father’s memoir, connecting, through text, chosen family to family of origin. In making an intertextual, transtemporal space where the poet’s voice and his father’s can meet on the page, Impossible Things moves through time to create a conversation with the past, speaking to the possibilities for healing generational trauma, even when the original survivors have become our ancestors.