Boy with Flowers

Boy with Flowers

Ely Shipley is a trans author and activist. He worked at CUNY in NYC and taught as an assistant professor of English at Baruch College, where he taught courses on gay and lesbian literature, poetry, and identity writing. He is currently a professor at Western Washington University. Shipley has won the Western Humanities Review Award in Poetry and the Virginia Faulkner Award. Boy With Flowers is Shipley's first book. Boy with Flowers won the 2007 Barrow Street Press book prize and the Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

Boy With Flowers consists of thirty-six poems. The poems are spread across three sections. Poems in section one, such as Roll of Dimes, Balloons, Army Tattoos, fever & halo, Magnolia, and the title poem Boy with Flowers focus on memories from his childhood. We meet his mother and aunt in passing, learn about his childhood friend Marissa, and catch glimpses of romantic moments between him and his former partners. Section two moves from childhood to young adulthood, focusing on missed opportunities and things left unsaid. Poems like Fountain recreate the beauty of things in his memories. Part three contains more poems explicitly about transness. He recalls working with trans teens in DC. The last poem of the book, Etymology, is a letter to his testosterone shots. Though some of the poems deal explicitly with his identity as a trans man (for example, wanting to wear a suit instead of a dress and stand with the men at his aunt's wedding), the book as a whole is not about transness. It is about a whole person, and being trans is just one part of the character's identity.

Shipley, Ely (author)

Barrow Street Press

2008

text

English

book