Trans (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
Raz's varied and serious new collection plays a range of styles  while sticking closely to the poet's life. About half the volume  describes Raz's troubled, but finally heartwarming, experience  with her daughter "Sarah," who changed her sex to become Raz's  adult son "Aaron." Other poems examine Raz's extended family she  is especially good on the very old (in a shocking poem set in a  nursing home) and on maternity and childbirth. Raz (Divine  Honors) has long taught English at the University of Nebraska at  Lincoln, where she edits the journal Prairie Schooner; some  vivid verse describes the Nebraska landscape and its  hardscrabble citizens. Whether she writes of Aaron or Sarah,  funerals or fields, Raz's tone remains sincere and open:  "Nothing to explain, no shield," she writes, "of paperthin skin  between history and the untender world." Raz employs, among  other devices, the hortatory intimacy of '70s confessionalism;  the expansive verse-paragraphs of an Albert Goldbarth or a  Deborah Digges; and a more disjunctive approach, often expressed  in couplets or short prose poems. Many lines seem over-the-top;  some are mawkish: "you, for all we've been through,/ are  identical genetically to the daughter you were." Raz does better  with terser, harsher verse, as in "Doing the Puzzle/Angry  Voices," where "Every book that documents birth/ puts on to  gender a meaning./ That piece of the junco tree is filled with  sparrows." Always articulate and sometimes well-crafted, the  volume relies too heavily on its subjects, yet its pleasures,  like its concerns, are genuine. (Oct.)  Forecast: Raz's principal subject her child's  transsexualism gives the book an obvious publicity angle, and  perhaps a niche audience as well (not transgender people, but  their families). Her longtime presence at Prairie Schooner, for  which she has edited "Best of" anthologies, and her editorship  of Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer (2001),  have given her a solid reputation. Throw in a public radio  appearance or glossy magazine mention, and the book could take  off.Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.