In this collection you are saying something that needs to be said and you are saying it in language that cannot be ignored or hidden from. The truth told with a very sharp knife. Yet part of this truth is that women allow this shit to go on. Do we not allow men to have the power you describe? It seems to me that as you rip men a new one—the same needs to happen to women. What in the hell are we doing—why do we let our power go? Without this emotional component the collection walks close to whining (in my opinion) which always occurs from a place of weakness. Yet this collection would seem to be aiming at a recognition of the power imbalance between men and women and the way men frequently force their will on us—and then a turn toward a new balance. But the only way that will happen is if women acknowledge their complicity in the imbalance.

The publisher of one of my collections, which dealt with CSA, including my own experiences and those of my best friend when I was young, made the comment above about it in 2011 after soliciting the work from me. I never should have allowed them to proceed with publishing the collection. I just came across the comment again while searching for something else in my email. That publisher was a woman, and it wasn’t Juliet Cook or Margaret Bashaar. It speaks to myriad ways in which some women and female-bodied poets who believe they’re empowering themselves and others can be misguided and do harm. It’s not just men in poetry who harm others and the community as a whole.

Through her lens, my work about CSA walked close to whining and needed to discuss power dynamics that don’t apply to children who are being harmed, including dynamics forced into the strict binary of male and female, one that’s oppositional, not dialectical. The speaker and others who inhabit the poems aren’t even male or female. That isn’t called out ever. As a nonbinary person (who was publicly identifying as trans at the time), it’s not how I envisioned them.*

And this was from someone who wanted to publish and ultimately did publish my collection. Again, I should have yanked it. She ended up quietly removing the collection at some point without telling me or preserving the files in any way. It was a digital collection with custom artwork. I would have liked to have had it, even just for myself. I believe I know why that happened. In any case, it was another form of erasure of me and my work.

Also, to those who say things like, Your work just isn’t for everyone, and that’s OK, please see that this assessment isn’t about the work, nor was that the case with the poet I just had the dreadful, unwanted interactions with. It’s fine for work to not be right for someone. These kinds of interactions go deeper than that, so please quit uncoupling literary assessment (which isn’t even what this kind of thing is) from personal attacks and assessments that go far afield of the work.

* The word nonbinary wasn’t yet in use, and trans felt like a better fit than saying I was bisexual. I knew gender was involved, not just sexuality, and the binary nature of the word bisexual wasn’t a good fit for me anymore, either. I knew both gender and sexuality were on a continuum. I was trying to find the language for my place on those continua as language was evolving to be more inclusive and less oppositional. Also, people can move around on these continua over the course of their lives. For instance, I’m asexual at this point, which used to be the last letter in LGBTQIA+, though it has largely been truncated away, along with the interior T, which has disappeared for political reasons. I never would have identified as asexual in my 20s or 30s. But bodies change, minds change, and age changes, which changes a lot of things about body and mind—in my case sexuality, hence my move to the term queer, which covers the waterfront where gender and sexuality are concerned. More specifically, thanks to a friend, I’ve started using the term neuroqueer because it’s not only inclusive of all my forms of neuroatypicality, it also suggests a relationship between my neuroatypicality and my sexuality and gender. For me, that relationship is real and meaningful.

The one thing I agree with in this publisher’s assessment is that I should not have allowed her to frame my work the way she did. It was a great publishing company. I didn’t think I’d ever get an opportunity like that again. I sold myself, my work, and my values, and I fawned at her the way I learned to in order to survival the unthinkable as a child. That will never happen again. I’d rather live in one of DT’s camps than live a life that’s bought and sold, one in which I’ve been bought and sold.

I will add this one last thought: I recognize that some of the same forces that shaped me in my life may have shaped this publisher in her life. I realize she’s been through it, probably for decades now, the way women, those who are female-bodied, and other oppressed and marginalized groups have been and continue to go through it. But she was still wrong in this instance. She foisted a huge thing on me and my work. Anyone can be misguided. I understand that more when someone isn’t coming from a place of completely (or at least largely) unexamined privilege. That means I do have empathy for her. I still shouldn’t have published with her.