Against our terribly ambivalent present—in which Black, trans, and other minoritized forms of life seem at once more possible than ever and, also, relentlessly under attack—An Optimism gives us poems in search of ways to survive—and even thrive.
Anchored by an epistolary sequence directed to the 20th century poet and activist Pauli Murray, and looking to the work of other trans, queer, and black feminist writers like Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and June Jordan for company and counsel, Cameron Awkward-Rich situates us in spaces intimate and capacious, from lovers’ beds to the Gamma Quadrant across the Milky Way.
A folded portal made of paper with literary ancestors in every crease, this book turns and turns over what it is to be, to want, to have already lost. Cameron Awkward-Rich offers us something more generous than possibility: he offers us the reckoning of our own wonder, care and incommensurability.”—Alexis Pauline Gumbs
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