Rachel Mann

enabling me to join via video link.

I fell ill on my way to Stansea yesterday.

Who knew the body contained so much shit and water?

And gosh, I discovered that in the last 24 hours.

So I'm going to read some poems from the new collection.

starting off with some poems from the section called Eleanor Among the Saints.

This is a book which seeks to recover a trans woman, Eleanor Reikner, from obscurity, a woman who lived in the late Middle Ages, a seamstress, a sex worker, someone who, as a trans person myself, I find great solidarity with.

The opening poem makes reference to a Hebrew word, masake, or masaket.

It means literally warp and weft, but it also means an intense focus of meaning.

Eleanor, in the beginning,

sew me, sew me weird, stitch me fingers, teeth, my lids and legs too, sew me new, together, apart, stitch me skill and fright,

Sew me not dolly, not plaything, but monster, thing of nightmare, all agency, free finally of what you'd make me.

Sew me into escape, oh god of thread, shoddy scrap.

You know, you know, text is textile, texture, text us.

You know all conjugations, the parts and trips of speech, all the fibers of the book, the stitching and snipping, all ways a world gets from there to here.

Assemble me kind.

Assemble me wild.

Read me insane and lovely and never afraid of clash.

Unpick me old, spin me a yarn worthy of queer.

I am story queen, myth-mad weirdo.