Winner of American Library Association's 2025 Stonewall Book AwardsāBarbara Gittings Literature Award
DEED, the follow-up to torrin a. greathouse's 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award winning debut, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, is a formally and lyrically innovative exploration of queer sex and desire, and what it can cost. Sprawling across art, eros, survival, myth, etymology, and musical touchstones from Bruce Springsteen to Against Me!, this new book both subverts and pays homage to the poetic canon, examining an artistic lineage that doesn't always love trans or disabled people back. Written in a broad range of received and invented formsāfrom caudate sonnets and the sestina, to acrostics and the burning haibunāDEED indicts violent systems of carceral, medical, and legal power which disrupt queer and disabled love and solidarity, as well as the potentially vicarious manner in which audiences consume art. This collection is a poetic triptych centered on the question of how, in spite of all these complications, to write an honest poem about desire. At its core, DEED is a reminder of how tenderness can be made a shield, a weapon, or a kind of faith, depending on the mouth that holds it.
[sample text]
from Etymythology
I'm clocked by etymology,
by the way even stilettos take their name
from a knife. The way a knife, well-honed,
can strip anything to the bone. Bear
with me, sometimes even the myths grow
blurry in the distance. The root of Artemis,
goddess of the hunt, is still unknown,
but likely comes from artamosābutcher.
Let's call this a kind of etymythology,
post hoc history; let's call Artemis
the root. For her wild heart. Her failed
femininity. Goddess of gender-fucked
girls. Crooked prayer. The word worship
is shaped from two shardsāmeaning worth
& its giving. A mouth gives faith shape
like clay. I mean that to pray is to god
a God. To be butch & butcher
the myth of a son, was to make
a goddess of myself.