Transanything: Essays. By Ever Jones

To “transanything” might mean that the borders between things become transparent, even malleable (xiv). Or there are no borders, just traces of restriction one once had agreed to obey. No borders, or binaries of the body, or the land. What one once believed remains enigmatically (in language Ever Jones borrows from Rilke) “in the stance of someone just departing” (14). Jones’s personal essays about gender transition, nature, wild animals, and the American West examine—in fragment, collage, lyric listing, and story—the author’s experience of the body and the land that contains them through both colonial traditions of narrative control and the actuality of wing flutter and mud. What these essays seek is not another edge of a human/nature or a male/female binary but something outside of category. As Jones puts it: “I was an unbetween: not between those two binaries but without them” (139–40). From birth, Jones writes, “the heteronormative gaze pinned all kind of meanings to me” (xiii). If one takes on the internal—and potentially othering—shift required to think past inherited binaries and colonial definitions of bodies and spaces, are they more or less free, more or less lonely, or both? Such is the lyric searching Jones tracks in their essays, seeking what exists behind unstable meanings humans have made. “In inquiring about loneliness,” Jones writes: “… What I want to know is if love—its essence, emotion, the performance of it—has altered. If the colonial imagination has wrapped itself too tightly around America, squeezing us away from each other” (113).