Cameron Awkward-Rich first got national notice for reading aloud his early poems, on stage and on videos: my students, years ago, showed me those videos as dramatic introductions to trans and asexual identities. He then got attention for poems that fit well on the page, concise elegant verse about growing up Black, coming out as trans, and surviving. In the same years he wrote academic prose about gender, identity and disability: some of that prose became The Terrible We, his 2022 study of transmasculinity, social deviance, and stigma, in books and on film and in daily life. It’s a scholarly book, the work of an academic, one who now teaches gender studies at the University of Massachusetts.
Awkward-Rich’s new book of poems (some in verse, some in prose, some with photographs) takes up his discursive interests along with his poet’s ear. It’s his strongest, because it brings those gifts together. It weaves modern lyric goals together with explicit arguments. And it puts forward those arguments—sometimes—with help from religious feeling: not so much Awkward-Rich’s own (it’s not a book of religious commitment, nor a book dead set against it) but rather the feeling, and the model, that he finds in Pauli Murray, the Black poet, activist, civil rights lawyer, political leader, and self-described “he/she personality” who found a late-life vocation as (in the words of a 1977 headline) “The First Negro Episcopal Priest.” Prose poems responding to Murray’s life make up the middle section of An Optimism (Persea, 2025). These pages reflect time spent in the archive at Radcliffe, addressing Murray’s legal work, Murray’s Christian commitments, the verse Murray wrote, and the ways in which the life, letters, and photographs suggest nonbinary, and transmasc, lives today.
Awkward-Rich’s magnificent title poem imagines building a life for himself, and finding fulfillment, as a project possible for other people, but perhaps never for him:
All my life, certainly, for as long
as I’ve known I had a life, I was
like the sparrow right now outside
my window, flying headfirst, incessantly
into what must seem, to her, like sky.
That bird reappears in another poem, one of seven with the identical title “It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times.” In this one, fifth-graders, seeing a teacher pretend to be dead, imagine their own mortality too. The “fifth-grade teacher … laid down forever on the floor / of the classroom … as we the children flew like so many // terrible, jeweled birds, headfirst into the window / of the rest of our lives.”
Professional literary critics, like me, might recognize here what the literary theorist Jonathan Culler considers the elements that define lyric: hyperbole, figuration, repetition, and a sense of ritual (how many times can a sparrow collide with a pane?), along with a special present tense: “forever,” and now. Compare Marianne Moore, a more or less secular poet who often wrote with her deeply pious mother in mind. Moore wrote in her longest lyric poem, “The Pangolin,” that its armor and scales, like the carvings high up on cathedrals, could not exist in this world “if that which is at all were not forever.” Where Moore saw herself in the pangolin—beautifully armored, safe in the forest from any predators other than us—Awkward-Rich sees himself instead in “Lucille’s Roaches,” the cockroaches who have to flee to be safe—from us—in several poems by the great Lucille Clifton.
What if we never feel safe, and have to keep running? What if only the present moment and its optative cousins (if-only, what-if, someday, not-yet) can help? Awkward-Rich sees those what-ifs in Murray’s life, and in his own, which says no to the bad answers that families, and institutions, may demand. No, I will not present my students with a perfect model of a happy adult trans man. No, I will not pair off with my one true love, forever, as the shrillest proponents of marriage insist that I do. No, I will not cover up my bad feelings, which persist even after my welcome transition. No, as one two-page spread of prose among Awkward-Rich’s letters to Murray insists: “Dear Pauli, / No. No. No. No. No. No. No.”
A simpler, easier story—or a worse poem—might end in some full and complete recognition, offering all the love he could want. Instead, with Murray (as these poems imagine Murray), Awkward-Rich lives in “the was / will-be. The salted circle. The not-yet.” Maybe that’s where a lot of us live. Maybe, as Awkward-Rich also suggests, the activist and priest imagined “living, somehow, in the future—ahead of myself is how you put it once”; maybe “this is a trans way of occupying time, living out the future in the present tense, embodying (for others, for yourself) Ernst Bloch’s ‘not yet.’”
Maybe that way of occupying time—with line breaks that offer constant anticipations, with boustrophedon turns and postponed arrivals—is just what lyric poems seem able to do. It’s a way of occupying time that stands at cross purposes to any normal life course, where Rosalind grows up to marry Orlando, Celia gets stuck with Oliver, only boys (and all boys) must grow up to be men, and only women have ever been girls. Another archival photograph shows Murray as Peter Pan. That wild English boy in turn gives Awkward-Rich the topic for yet one more poem (not otherwise about Murray): “The tragedy of Peter / is not, as you might think, that he remains a child, wavering forever // on the precipice of what we might call love, if we are lazy, a real life. / No, the trouble is that he never was a boy.” For Awkward-Rich too, the trouble “isn’t that I was a boy,” though he would grow up to be a trans Black man, “a me who startles from his skin” even now.
What if we never feel safe, and have to keep running?
Living the right kind of life, the life almost all Americans learn to expect, or writing the “right,” expected, affirming poem, means “a series of movements at the end of which: joy.” But any honest poem, for Awkward-Rich, shows growing up the wrong way, or refusing to grow up, too. He asks how it felt to be labeled “transsexual,” “a word my students don’t understand how I could want.” He asks how it felt—how it feels—to inhabit “a body so alienated from itself it is functionally dead,” dissociated, impossible, unable to speak without feeling unheard. And—if we read him carefully—we might ask whether feeling misunderstood, or unseen, because we are trans, amounts to a special, urgent case of the way in which nobody feels wholly understood.
The impossible promise in the lyric poem—in any lyric work, Awkward-Rich’s among them—comes with a full understanding, a way to be heard and seen, not just through a “message” (whatever the poem seems to say) but also through what it does, and how it sounds. That promise may seem (as it does to me) secular, or (as it did to Walt Whitman) akin to a new religion. It may also seem like a preview for the way we might be seen, wholly and fully, in another world, a version of Heaven, by (say) a Christian God. Murray’s posthumously published autobiography concludes as Murray affirms that Episcopal calling, “empowered to minister the Sacrament of One in whom there is no North or South, no black or white, no male or female—only the spirit of love and reconciliation, drawing us all toward the goal of human wholeness.” By that point Murray (perhaps, as Awkward-Rich speculates, under the influence of the radical-feminist, but also anti-trans, theologian Mary Daly) had rejected “he/she” in favor of a reluctant womanhood.
Murray’s earlier life gives this contemporary trans poet materials more to his taste. Prose poems begin as letters to Murray, responding to photographs reproduced in the book. “Dear Pauli,” one page begins, “I look for as long as I can stand at one particular image. You as young man. You as Pete … You are young, little brother, so young.” In “Trans Study: Untitled 4 (Facial Expression),” a photographed “figure, having been exposed, overexposed, to light, has become like a shadow or a barely lit shape on the midnight lake. For the sake of simplicity, we could call the figure a man, but I will not.” What is a man, that thou art mindful of him?
The Terrible We gives “attention to trans maladjustment,” “bad feelings,” ways in which being trans, today and in the past, cannot help but feel bad (whatever joy it also brings). “Of course, bad feelings are produced and exacerbated by social structures,” for example laws that we can (with Murray) resist, or tear down. And yet “there will always be a residue of bad feeling, an unavoidable fact of being embodied, of being a self” whom the social world cannot quite hold. The optimism in Awkward-Rich’s poems coheres not as a message, nor as an argument, but as a demonstration, made elegant through the sonic technology of a lyric poem. That poem looks not like oratory, not even like a love letter, but like an object designed for self-preservation, like the black boxes recovered from airplanes, or like a message in a bottle: “Love, // the poem is not a craft I steer to reach you. Here I am.” Seven iambs, in a row, with a mild almost-caesura stuck amid the sixth one: there it is. If not a black box, a bottle, a photograph—the poem may suggest, instead, like a person’s face, or the head of Orpheus, singing downstream: “She turns to face herself— // she turns to face— / she turns to tenderness.”
The present tense, the always-unfinished musical embodiment, of the lyric poem gives us one resource to imagine trans bodies as something other than stigmatized corpses: we are impossible faces, alive after death, and we sing. (I draw here, as I suspect that Awkward-Rich draws, on the theorist Allen Grossman, who imagines the lyric poem as a version of Orpheus, the severed head that floats downstream and sings.) Nonrealist fiction offers another resource: among Awkward-Rich’s poems about lives not his own, my favorite brings in the Deep Space Nine character Odo, once enslaved, given a name that translates as “nothing,” indissolubly connected to his home planet’s Protean home species, “changelings who, wounded by history, revenge themselves against what they call the solids”: outer space versions of Black radical activism, and incarnations of trans rage. No wonder so many trans people write, and cherish, science fiction.
Awkward-Rich, instead, like Murray, writes poems. Murray’s archive, as Awkward-Rich sees, contains a potential perhaps realized in Murray’s priesthood, perhaps refused in Murray’s decision that “race and sex … are biologically permanent,” “completely imposed … and there is no way that one can escape.” Would Murray have come to another opinion today? “Was it that you could no longer bear hope’s disappointment? Was it that you were, in some important way, already dead? // All I know is that by the end of your life, having discovered no other way, you had become convinced that race, that sex, were closed forms. Pauli, listen, they aren’t. // It isn’t.” The frame of the prose poem, its white spaces, its long pauses, show what still needs saying.
We might ask whether feeling misunderstood, or unseen, because we are trans, amounts to a special, urgent case of the way in which nobody feels wholly understood.
Awkward-Rich’s optimism does not just respond to the messages trans people hear growing up (your life is impossible; happiness is impossible; your body will never be yours). It also responds to the philosophically sophisticated line of thought called Afropessimism, which holds that Western culture considers, and that Western metaphysics will consider, Black people inherently less than human. Murderous, contemptuous racist assumptions are not (as liberal thinkers insist) a removable excrescence on Enlightenment thought, but rather its cornerstone. If Afro-pessimists are right, then being Black in America will always mean being in danger, and being afraid. Awkward-Rich sees that kind of fear in himself too, in another poem called “It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times,” dedicated to Ahmaud Arbery, the Georgia jogger murdered in 2020, a few months before George Floyd. “I am careful to keep my distance,” Awkward-Rich concludes, “from the woman who is careful / to smile at me in turn”; “Somedays I run / until my feet go numb, // hum. Somedays I am / the darkest thing I’ll see.”
Some, run, numb, hum, am: again, the resources of lyric poems cohere like a body, and a kind of integrity, that daily life may never hold. To that life the poem says, again: no. No. No. Some other space, some better way of life, must exist: if not now, then not yet; if not here, then somewhere. Maybe Murray could find it, or found it, in church. Awkward-Rich looks instead to a limitless, non-white atmosphere. “In daylight branches cut across // Blue opening untamed sky” where “I // Am what you cannot touch.” Those lines on the page incorporate open spaces, like unanswered questions, whose impression no prose paragraph can reproduce. It’s a flight from description, from Earth, and from embodiment, a form of dissociation. And, as the poet says in The Terrible We, for some artists “dissociation—once a mechanism for surviving confinement, sexual abuse and dysphoria—becomes a formal resource, a perspective,” able to “produce inhabitable worlds rather than destroying them.”
These pages place Awkward-Rich among those artists. Dissociation—world-building, enabling, sometimes beautiful dissociation—might also make a foundation for poems and for poetry, ambiguously separating one line, or one block of a prose poem’s text, from another, insisting on fractures and non-coterminous meanings (as when enjambment slices apart a phrase), rather than offering singleness, unity, wholes. The opposite of poetry, in this sense, is not fiction, nor fact, but continuous, unified narrative, about realistic people who always live in the same world. Trans stories and poems instead (Pauli Murray’s among them) represent people who “lived in the wrong time, one in which [we] could not yet be.”
An Optimism quotes, approvingly, twentieth-century poets who found a populist voice, a way to reach readers put off by mixed, or pessimistic messages: Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, even Mary Oliver (“What will you do … with your one wild and precious life?”). At the same time, Awkward-Rich will not follow those wide-open roads: he cannot imitate them directly, even if he wanted to, because he makes poems from his own life, not from theirs. No wonder he views his own poems, at best, as “a raft inside / A raft inside the whale,” a way to face these best and worst of times, in “a country that is, more than usual, not ours.” The sonic qualities of the lyric object, not just the argument it contains, show him to himself, and (if we pay attention) to us, whether or not we think we resemble him.