Them

A timely and innovative poetry collection from the author of the genre-defying Deep Wheel Orcadia, the first poetry winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, bestowed in 2022.

I raise my great foot over the city of speech.
My chest is bound beneath two straps.
The one is named diversity and the other is named inclusion.
When I sweep my arms through the thick air,
blessings fall to the folk below. And my foot
answers their prayer: silencing.

So begins Them! by Harry Josephine Giles, a challenging and subversive collection of poems about trans life as it is lived now, through the lenses of work, technology, and ecology. Witty, candid, furious, and always compelling, Them! is equally dynamic in its range of forms, featuring visually innovative textual disruptions, prose poems, lyrics, and erasure. Giles negotiates the fraught and fruitful space between the worlds of "online" and the "outside," and how they fuse and diverge in the imagination.

This collection arrives at a time when trans rights are at the forefront of public discourse and will speak to a young and informed readership. It includes the poem "May a Transsexual Hear a Bird?" anthologised in 100 Queer Poems (Penguin, 2021).