Ava Nathaniel Winter on Poetic Embodiment, Queerness in Judaism, and Finding Art in the Disturbing

Lit Hub is excited to feature another entry in a new series from Poets.org: “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month, they spoke to Ava Nathaniel Winter. Ava Nathaniel Winter is the author of Transgenesis (Milkweed Editions, 2024), selected by Sean Hill for the 2023 National Poetry Series, and the poetry chapbook Safe House (Thrush Press, 2013). She teaches at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in the department of English and the women’s and gender studies program.

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Poets.org: Transgenesis is deeply rooted in twentieth-century history as well as contemporary Jewish scholarship. How long did it take you to do research for this collection, and which texts were integral to your preparation and understanding?

Ava Nathaniel Winter: I began seriously researching the historical aspects of the book in the fall of 2016, partly as a response to the resurgence of explicit neo-Nazi and white Christian nationalist rhetoric and violence that accompanied that year’s presidential election. A lot of people expressed surprise or even shock at that moment, as if the hatred and violence had come out of nowhere. But it seemed very clear to me that both the rhetoric and violence of that moment were the continuation of patterns that have been present in American political life for more than a century.

Hatred was being expressed more explicitly and more publicly because changes in communication technology were being harnessed strategically for political purposes. Something similar happened in the 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan took advantage of new communication technologies like radio and expanded their small membership into a nationally influential political organization in just a few short years.

Linda Gordon’s book The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition describes the Klan of the 1920s as a kind of corporate pyramid scheme growing its membership through “what might be called the social media of its time,” technologies like radio and photography. So turning toward the historical does not mean, for me, turning away from the present moment. It is a way to ground myself while thinking and writing through the instabilities and uncertainties of our moment.

My research process continued through the summer of 2023, when the book went into copyediting. I can be quite obsessive about research, and I often end up reading hundreds of pages of history and theory and criticism as research for just one or two poems, so I am indebted to too many texts to name here.

But Miriam Winter’s Trains: A Memoir of a Hidden Childhood During and After World War II profoundly influenced my thinking about the relationship between memory, identity, and the construction of family. There is a long poem in the middle of Transgenesis that is explicitly in conversation with Miriam Winter’s Trains.

The explorations of sex and gender in the Jewish tradition and in my own lived experience were profoundly shaped by Daniel Boyarin’s Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man and Max K. Strassfeld’s Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature. The intersection of queer theory and community with the study of Talmud may seem obscure, but it has changed my life.

Poets.org: The poem “Midrash” ends remarkably, with the body revered as holy because of its changing. The milk from a male represents the sacredness of queer possibility, and the love and sustenance we miss out on when we attempt to confine the body. Could you speak more about this symbolism?

ANW: Well, the imagery is very old. The epigraph of that poem, the image of the Biblical Mordekhai nursing Esther from his own breast, comes from Bereshit Rabbah, a classical Jewish text of the fourth or fifth century, based on even older oral traditions. “Queer possibility” is a lovely way for us to make meaning from the image today, but there is a very long tradition in Rabbinic literature of acknowledging that the categories of “male” and “female
do not adequately describe all human beings.

The rabbis of the Talmud identify six different categories of human sex/gender variation, and they acknowledge that sex assignments made at birth might need to be revised later in life. By the fifth century, the rabbis were already considering the possibility that many of the biblical “patriarchs” might have been androgynos or tumtumim—people we would probably think of as intersex today, or in some ways even nonbinary.

In her book The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, the poet and theologian Joy Ladin reads the story of God granting Abraham and Sarah fertility—not to mention new names and a new sense of identity, as a kind of divinely facilitated gender transition. To frame this reading as “trans” or “queer” in the sense that we understand those words today might be anachronistic.

But Ladin is reading with the tradition, not against it, in the sense that the rabbis long ago imagined Abram and Sarai were born as tumtumim (intersex/ sterile/of indeterminate sex) and god later facilitated their transition into the male “Abraham” and the female “Sarah” through divine intervention.

So when the rabbis describe a character usually imagined as male developing breasts and using them to “feed and sustain” Esther, who would go on to save the Jews from destruction, they sanctify a kind of sex/gender transition. This image has existed within the rabbinic tradition for more than 1500 years. Nothing about that is new.

Poets.org: Olfactory sense memory is a motif in Transgenesis and an interesting one because it is more abstract, less tangible than other forms of sensory imagery. “Jasmin et Cigarette,” as you mention in the notes section, takes its title from a perfume of the same name.

In “Rollermills Antique Mall,” the scent of baking bread is foregrounded. If writing is an act of observing and making connections, how integral was this particular sensory experience to your writing about both historical and personal memory?

ANW: I love this question! It’s funny, because I have a fairly weak sense of smell, and I often don’t notice a smell until someone points it out.

But there are certain actions I repeat until they become almost ritualized, and they become very closely associated with particular smells. The smell of baking bread soothes me so deeply that I sometimes bake just for the smell and give all the bread away to my friends.

The partner I wrote about in “Jasmin et Cigarette” left me a bottle of that perfume as something to remember her by when we broke up. We parted very tenderly, which of course wrecked us both.

Poets.org: The epigraph by the Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña, “An object is not an object. It is the witness to a relationship,” introduces the second section of the book, “Archived Light.” Much of this section, and many other poems throughout the book, respond to objects, documents, and speech.

What is your relationship to form and its ability to elucidate relationships in poetry, especially as you explore constructions of Jewishness, queer eroticism, and masculinity?

ANW: Poetic form is material, and the reading of a poem is always an embodied act. I can’t write a poem without reading it aloud many, many times to feel my way through each of its iterations, each of its possibilities. Even when you read silently, alone in your bed, the tiny pause in cognition as your eye moves from the end of one line to the beginning of the next is an embodied response that the form demands.

Writing in response to physical objects in my material environment is a way of keeping myself honest and keeping myself present. I try to get curious about things that disturb me, in my environment or in my embodied experience, rather than just dissociating, which often feels like the easiest way for me to cope in the moment. But curiosity makes for better poems.

Poets.org: What are you currently reading?

ANW: The last book of poetry I read was Abby Minor’s As I Said: A Dissent. Minor does some really powerful archival work around the history of abortion in that book. Her poems can also be quite funny, in their own dark way, which I admire. Humor’s a tricky thing to pull off in a poem.

Right now I’m reading Adania Shibli’s short novel Minor Detail. I’m picky about fiction. I lose patience unless the writing really works at the sentence level. But Shibli’s style, as translated by Elisabeth Jaquette, is really striking.

I was also very moved by Fady Joudah’s most recent book of poems, which is simply titled […]. That book would be worth reading for anyone interested in the work I’m doing in Transgenesis.

Poets.org: What are your favorite poems on Poets.org?

ANW: There are so many! Any list can only be a sliver of the truth. Saeed Jones’s “Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown” woke something in me when I first read it a decade ago. Adrienne Rich’s “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” might be the poem of hers that has influenced me the most, which is saying something. Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s “This Is What Makes Us Worlds” is simply gorgeous. Do yourself a favor and go read it now!

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“enjambments,” a monthly interview series produced by the Academy of American Poets, will highlight an emerging or established poet who has recently published a poetry collection. Each interview, along with poems from the poet’s new book, and a reading by the poet, will be published on Poets.org and shared in the Academy’s weekly newsletter.