Rachel Mann

If world without end, then glory too.

And if glory, then all our loves, all cries, longing for all things are held in you.

Glory be to the venflon and to the saline and to the catheter.

World without end.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Rachel Mann, thank you very much for being in this selection.

Gosh, yeah, well, I mean, as you will know, Padraig, but others probably won't, in a poem in my first collection, A Kingdom of Love, there's a line that runs something like those without names are not, that to be deprived of a name is to be deprived of identity and those who end up in extermination camps.

I guess...

I mean, chattel slavery is another example, deprived of names which tell stories and histories.

And there's something for me, I guess, as a person of faith as well, to acknowledge that naming is an inflection point in sometimes in becoming that which is new.

You know, the Bible is full of people receiving new names.

But also it's a way of weaving yourself into story, that sort of genealogy.

But without names, we are lost.

And as a trans person, as someone who has a discovered name, and I guess a dead name as well, I want to acknowledge that in my dead name, that I'm disavowing something and disavowing a relationship with

with a family story as well, which I mean, you know, it's been beautifully healed in my own case, but isn't true for every trans person.

So yeah, sorry if I'm rambling, Padraig, tell me, but I think let us come back to the abiding power, potency and strangeness of name.

Yeah, gosh.