An evocative book of transformations, Hilda Raz’s Trans fearlessly engages the world of ideas, the body, and the senses–a striking and powerful follow up by the poet whose recent credits include Truly Bone (1999) and Divine Honors (1997). From a poetic tradition that includes works by Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, Trans is a playful and daring collection of poems, at once emotional, compelling, and confusing. This confusion however seems an intentional effect as Raz negotiates the complex interstices of difference between socially constructed binaries and categories concerning gender, life, death, illness, the knowable and unknowable. This montage of ideas and images is indeed disorienting, but I was encouraged by the urgency of the poems to make sense of the vivid yet fragmented images and stories, which authentically capture the mind in its natural state, its twists and turns, its journey through feeling and memory.
        Trans is divided into four sections, each thematically organized according to various definitions of the term trans. The concept of trans ("meaning across . . . beyond, over, . . . to look through, to transcend, to transcribe . . . to lead across . . . a crossing") is also manifest through the way the poems were ordered. While Raz wrote the poems and established the four-section structure of the book, her son Aaron selected their order. In this way, the varied treatment of the slippery term trans is also mirrored by this structural collaboration between mother and son.
        The most compelling moments occur in Raz’s poems that examine the relationship between a mother and her transsexual son. In the title poem of the book, Raz describes a therapy session in which the mother-narrator grapples to understand and accept her son, and recalls the conversation in which he told her he was indeed a man, who would soon have ‘the surgery.’ Amidst the furious emotional pitch with which the poem begins, the narrator is compelled to remind herself: "Be honest/here. Love is the word he said in closing." The final lines of the poem profess the mother’s realization of her son’s struggles, which the narrator also claims as her own: "Transsexual–like life, not easy–in this century./ My kid. And me in the same boat with him, mine." Here, Raz reveals solidarity between mother and child. In this case, trans refers both to the physical fluidity of gender and on a conceptual level to the growing understanding between mother and son.
         In "Prelude" Raz’s narrator continues to proclaim love as an element in her thinking about her son:

reliable tongue tucked up into the silence broken
by only one word, love, one phrase, you can, one other,
I’m here, child, your absolute company
as you are changed–radically–from one thing to another.

With stylistic agility, Raz captures the fragmented nature of thought. The second line quoted above with its stumbling meter run through by commas, pauses, and readjustments reveals a remarkable immediacy and the difficult articulation of ideas as they are being processed. In terms of their content, both "Trans" and "Prelude" do not conclude with the speaker claiming her offspring specifically as daughter or son. If this poem is indeed a prelude to other discussions of gender in this book, perhaps Raz is suggesting that this mother can express her love to her son by neutralizing gender, thus momentarily pushing aside what is unfamiliar to recognize and embrace what is. Love therefore becomes the vehicle through which the speaker can trans, or connect with her child.
         In "Stone," Raz presents the voice of Aaron, the transsexual son, talking to his mother:

When I used to look in the mirror it was blank, says Aaron of Sarah.
And then Aaron says Mom! I’m the same person.
You’re the one who had the sex change.
I’ve always been as I am. You bet.

This is an exquisitely expressed moment in which Aaron, once Sarah, claims that in fact he didn’t undergo a sex change; he was always Aaron. "You bet" is the narrator’s confirmation of Aaron’s words as true. Interestingly, Aaron doesn’t claim himself as a man, but rather as a person, an identity that is less fixed than the usual designations of man or woman. Perhaps in this way, both Aaron and the poet suggest that trans speaks to a fluid continuum of gender in which people in and of themselves, regardless of where they are on the gender continuum, are worthy of love and the challenging work that often goes along with it.
        Though there are several poems focused on transsexual issues, Trans is also quite playful in terms of its commentary on gender, as seen through Raz’s cycle of poems on popular women icons. In "Wonder Woman’s Rules of the Road" Raz simultaneously lauds and satirically examines Wonder Woman’s strength, clothes, and island of women. Raz’s humorous concluding line: "Strong abs are to die for" is countered by more concrete advice: "The best asset is a wise mother, better a goddess." Continuing to question gender roles in the one-line poem "Wonder Woman and Daughters," Raz writes: "She didn’t have one, but she could’ve."
         Trans is a book about questions and assumptions, disordering and reordering told by a poet courageously exploring gender, binaries, and biases. Raz places the reader in a poetic space that is unsure and even uncomfortable while simultaneously depicting beautifully articulated, emotionally sensitive, and humorous moments. Exploding the boundaries of poetic content in her treatment of traditionally taboo subjects, Raz deftly moves among superficially imposed categories by which too many of us order our lives. She offers her readers a stunning and refreshing re-vision of both poetry and humanity.