Explaining A Dress: Transfeminine Erasure and Vindication, Jessie Keary

Description

Winner of the 2024 Frontier Poetry Debut Chapbook Prize, Explaining a Dress: Transfeminine Erasure and Vindication by Jessie Keary is a haunting and luminous collection that unravels the silenced histories of trans women through the delicate and deliberate art of erasure poetry.

In Keary’s hands, language becomes both scalpel and thread—cutting through centuries of invisibility while stitching together fragments of lives, fabrics, and memories once erased from record. The poems transform the material symbols of femininity—scarves, silk shirts, gingham gowns—into testaments of endurance, self-fashioning, and reclamation.

At once political and deeply personal, this chapbook moves between violence and vindication, weaving tenderness through the act of survival. Explaining a Dress stands as a vital chorus of voices long denied, offering both witness and tribute to transfeminine resilience, beauty, and the power of being seen.