By Ian-Khara Ellasante, PhD
be some Other work (or, because Rickey Laurentiis)i
you could put to death the fathers a whole god shock & drown
the spires of men and kill the man too with ten years you could
cool belief’s formless steam condense it to conviction then
with a torch of hellfire thaw it to mist again in ten years you could
fold a lopsided crease across every certain thing you could
dismantle in silence let a moon take over let her lay your layers
with ten years you could score an orchestra of lovers some you
some playing one eager measure others their infinite refrains
you could sift the soil of your fallow fields dampen them dark
rich them with woe you could walk the old furrows flat
at the pace of severe patience let them spiral into labyrinth
cryptic loops curves of pearl and shell and submit no map
you could be subterranean river mirror to Sovereign valley
take up glad responsibility for Her life Her briefest material
I suppose any ten-year span in a human life teems with change, as transitions of all kinds wind through the years. Some decades, however, are wholly metamorphic. Some decades are chrysalis, a layers-deep enfolding from which we emerge, something radically else. Those years in which we disintegrate, those in which we gestate, those in which we fire-walk, fire-weep, and then the years after, when that singed wisdom and hard-earned self-determination settles into our marrow. Ten years is long enough to transform what we mean when we say home and who we mean when we say I.
Ten years spans the publication of Rickey Laurentiis’s two books, Boy With Thorn (2015) and Death of the First Idea (2025). The poet reflects on this time period:
I’m grateful for the ten years in between. I can’t pretend to the thought that all of that was elected or chosen. There was a period of about five years in which I wasn’t writing at all. It was a sad time, and it was a time in which I had to go into that incubator space and really take responsibility for my life. Take responsibility for my sadnesses and my lonely feelings. And really transmute that, transform that into what you see today. I’m really… I’m really proud of myself.ii
The passage of a decade is palpable in the contrast between the collections. While the voice is unmistakable and steadfast, there is no attempt at symmetry here. “Let’s just say that I wrote this book with such distance from my first book and whoever that was,” Laurentiis says, “but also with such intimacy.”iii
Her much-anticipated second collection landed like a thunderbolt in 2025. At 142 pages, Death of the First Idea is what the poet herself describes as “a fat book.”iv This is a book that truly lives in the physical and psychic space it inhabits. It is a banquet of sensation: hardcover and slick in its glossy jacket, electric pink surging against the hazy-toned image overflowing the front cover’s frame. In it, a bedroom and its occupant, lounging and nude, in enough shadow to be not-quite silhouette and enough light to set their brown skin aglow.
This volume has been turned up. And Laurentiis confirms it: this is a “really loudly trans” book, she says. “Almost unyielding. Like ‘another poem about being trans?!’ Yeah. Another one, girl. Flip the page.” While the book is “very formally” trans, “In another sense, I wanted it to be kinda taken for granted. Like, I’m just taking a walk, there are roses, and I’m trans. That’s it.”v
I have been wondering about the impulse many of us feel to poeticize transition; to write our “really loudly trans” poems.vi It’s one thing to transmit information; to detail the tedium of a series of social, and perhaps medical, processes, as we navigate “gender’s manual traffic.”vii There is certainly an audience for this kind of trans reportage. But despite, or perhaps because of, the challenges of profoundly dwelling at the convergence of Blackness and transness, we are prompted by an urgency to transmute these particular textures into artifacts that are both beautiful and compelling. Marquis Bey maintains that poetry is the literary form of Black trans feminism.viii Indeed. To be both Black and trans requires us to transcend the constraints of ordinary language, to hang our faith on metaphor and mythos as a means of translation. “I’ve always been Black, I’m always gonna be Black, and so I don’t need to necessarily hammer that on the head, but it hasn’t been true that I’ve always been trans,” Laurentiis notes. “And it’s not always true that I’ve been a woman, and that… that journey, exactly how it went, is not necessarily interesting to me on the page. But to actually create a mythology, a mythos around it. Towards that kind of idea.”ix
Aspects of Laurentiis’s engagement with the mythological contribute to a burgeoning motif wherein Black trans and queer poets employ figures from assorted mythologies in the conveyance of Black and trans and queer subjectivity.x Certainly we each have our reasons for reaching across a range of socially constructed borders to time travel with the likes of Hermaphroditus, Eshu/Elegba, Narcissus, Afrekete, and Diana, even as we write toward “a future, next, liberated world.”xi For Laurentiis, it’s about bringing in “antecedents of a trans idea”xii to both convey an ancient lineage and to summon signatories: As a Black writer, she observes, “I have a fuller literary tradition to look back on and say ‘Okay, I’m not Phillis Wheatley, so I don’t need to have signatories,’ right. Whereas, to some extent, when I realized I was a trans writer, I did kinda feel like that. I felt like, ‘Oh my god, I suddenly need signatories to underline this as poetry and as something worthy of the lyric.’”xiii
Hieroglyphing in forms “both sensual and abstract, both beautiful and communicative,” as a poet and a philosopher, Laurentiis revels in the spirit of theorizing Barbara Christian champions in “The Race for Theory.”xiv From Emily Dickinson to Audre Lorde, from Tiresias of Thebes to Jesus of Nazareth, from Palestine to New Orleans, her work testifies to a well-sourced wellspring. Laurentiis’s creative theorizing is yet grounded and clearly at-home in Black feminist and Black trans feminist consciousness.
Transing the Black (textual) Body
Within Black trans feminist ways of knowing and being, the self-determined act of transing the Black body is a liberatory home-making. I’ve been thinking and writing for a few years about what it means to live in the diasporic Black body and make a home—in lieu of homeland—of embodied Blackness. Absent ancestral homelands to fold into and out of ourselves, we make the Black body home. Despite the white supremacist enslaving-settler-colonial demand that Black bodies and Black embodiment signify eligibility for both appropriation and annihilation, the original and everlasting demand is simple: our de facto sovereignty over our own bodies.xv For those of us who have emerged into understanding ourselves as trans or otherwise gender-expansive, within Black trans feminist consciousness, making the Black body more home via any subtle gradation of transition is more than a re-staking of the fenceposts. It is an interrogation of the whole idea of gender as a viable boundary and a refusal to attempt laying a foundation on such unstable terrain.xvi So, yes, we “must confess the Trans is dangerous.”xvii
Such home-making extends to the ways in which we also trans the Black textual body. We write ourselves into self-determined textual being and we write ourselves over again: rewrite, overwrite, revise, make addendum to our textual sovereign selves. We might trans the Black textual body by introducing a multi-vocality that makes this body feel and sound more expansively like home; as do the double-titled poems throughout Death of the First Idea.xviii For example: “Telling the Story (Or, Way of the Serpent)” and “Two Seconds the Slave (Or, Carnival Baby)” and “Spiral, Surrounded by Spoiled Accord (Or, Later Universe).” Laurentiis points out that the or in these double titles is “pressing upon plurality.”xix Thus, the or does not indicate a binary choose-your-own-adventure at the outset of the poem; instead, it offers the reader a swiveling and multi-arrowed compass. You get to have all the adventures. Buckle up.
Palimpsest as Textual Transing: “Improvising on an Early Theme (or, One Country)”
In the manner of palimpsest, the indelible shadow of the preceding text is forevermore part of the new thing; previous iterations are retrospectively transed. What came before is never completely supplanted; it serves, instead, as archive and version history. In Death of the First Idea, Laurentiis offers a new iterationxx of Boy With Thorn’s “One Country.” The palimpsestic new poem, titled “Improvising on an Early Theme (or, One Country),” is not just a revision, but a thoroughly evolved world that retrospectively transforms the interpretation of the earlier poem. The poet offers important context:
You know, this is the secret: I had no idea that I was trans writing Boy With Thorn. And so I came into that knowledge over this ten years. But the poems were aware. And so even in the poem “Improvising on an Early Theme,” it has the moment where the penis gets cut off. And that happens twice in Boy With Thorn. Not to get into the particulars of what transness is—nothing gets cut off, per se—but metaphorically, metaphorically. I found that arresting, because I’m like “oh, the poems already were introducing myself to myself.”xxi
The textual transing between “One Country” and “Improvising,” with a few subtle but significant changes, pivots on the will of a more agentive speaker. In the first iteration, the speaker begins:
I want to be released from it.
I want its impulses stunned to lead.xxii
In this poem, where desire is evident though agency is absent, all of this wanting feels like an invocation for a type of dying. In “Improvising,”xxiii however, the now self-determined speaker’s will is in full effect. Between these iterations, if becomes when, underscoring her resolve, as if she is saying, “I did this. I was not passive. I said I wanted the pageant of it to end and I made it so. Here’s how.”
Improvising on an Early Theme (or, One Country)xxiv
I wanted to be released from it.
I wanted its impulses stunned to lead,
That body. Its breath.
Let it. Let the whole pageant
end. If my body had a river in it
I did drain it. If by the river
was a city, let a storm shock & drowned it.
When in the city was a boy made sick
from his body, the freak passions of it,
I letted him out—his brown skin
lifting two shells. Let it. Let all
his limbs be popped and unhinged. First
their penis, its quick flight, as if a comet.
The eight fingers next, then thumbs,
then tongue, till every star was on the floor,
dismissed, each pointed in its own
direction, each became a door
to the one country where Her body is
loved and made for.
One Countryxxv
I want to be released from it.
I want its impulses stunned to lead.
This body. Its breath.
Let it. Let the whole pageant
end. If my body had a river in it
I would drain it. If by the river
was a city, let a storm shock and drown it.
If in the city was a boy made sick
from his body, the freak passions of it,
let him come out—his brown skin
lifting as a shell. Let it. Let all
his limbs pop and unhinge. First
his penis, its quick flight, as if a comet.
The eight fingers next, then thumbs,
then tongue, till every star is on the floor,
dismissed, each pointing in its own
direction, each another door
to the one country where his body is
loved and made for.
The verb let enters the fullness of its capacity in the new iteration; much hinges on what this let can do and become.
1st :“I would drain it. If by the river/ was a city, let a storm shock and drown it.”xxvi
2nd: “I did drain it. If by the river/ was a city, let a storm shock & drowned it.”xxvii
We see “drown it” become “drowned it” here as the speaker takes action. As a result of the previous line’s “I did drain it,” the connotation shifts from the passive “let the city be shocked and drowned by a storm” to the active “I let a storm shock it & I drowned it.” The verb let changes its face and its function again a few lines later with “I letted him out.” Here, with the lingering exertion of “I did drain it,” letted brings to mind the ancient curative practice of bloodletting. In this iteration, he is not being let out of “his brown skin,” which is not “lifting as a shell.”xxviii Instead, brown skin is “lifting two shells,”xxix suggesting the emergence of breasts.
Let’s circle back to this potent little ampersand. You didn’t miss it, did you? Laurentiis uses the symbol nowhere else in either iteration; so it is asking to be contemplated. What else is it doing? Maybe it’s making “shock” and “drown” into one move, a move made by the storm as it is perhaps conjured by the speaker. Maybe it’s meant to suggest that this shocking and drowning is a more casual operation, not as intense an undertaking as such verbs typically imply. Maybe the ampersand makes the progression from “[I] let a storm shock” to “[I] drowned it” a quicker, smoother step. As a textual transing, the various possibilities for this ampersand’s functions mirror the ways we condense to expand. Delving deeply to more precisely articulate our textual selves might yield symbology or other condensed language. But, it multiplies the textual possibilities of who we can be and what we can mean. As it is employed here, the ampersand is more than just a contraction of “and;” it’s capable of more than “and” could do. Condensed in this way, its potential and capacity expand.
The gendered third-person pronouns, italicized by the poet throughout “Improvising,” are truly transing it up as they shift throughout the poem. Thus, it is “his brown skin” that “lifts two shells”xxx as breasts emerge. And the penis is no longer “his;” it is “their penis.” The their there could be the singular they/them/their, pronouns used by many folks engaging expansively with gender. Their might also be a liminal-space holder in which the penis, with “its quick flight,” is or has been simultaneously both his and hers; in which case, their serves as a plural possessive pronoun for this conjoined letting-loose. Finally, it is “Her body.”xxxi After all this determined letting and loosening, the body is now wholly Hers.
In the improvisation of it all, the implication is that these disengaged parts are the available material that then change function, become differently useful, to serve as compass and cartography. Then “each became a door,” empowering multiple modes of passage and points of entry:
to the one country where Her body is
loved and made for.xxxii
Textual Transing toward the Non-Contingent Self in “Coming Back to Poetry (Or, Trans—?)”
In “Coming Back to Poetry (Or, Trans—?),” Laurentiis employs a double title, which I read here as a practice of textual transing. In this title, the m-dash after “Trans” feels like a placeholder for some other term, some other type of transing, some other way of thinking-and-being to move through, across, or beyond. Or maybe the m-dash prolongs the moment of assured certainty… before a confident declaration is recast into a question. This poem supports both hypotheses and more.
Coming Back to Poetry (Or, Trans–?)xxxiii
I guess I’ve been androgynous (in that ugly way) all my days,
I didn’t know. No one said Know it. But I mowed my green lawns well
ashamed: my buoyant, gay labor, like a crow flies, sweated for future. It made my Body swell
not at all, timid buddings no Roses & slowly; so I felt insufficiently male. So I craved, swell
Like ants in a colony, for more: “Trans–?” So the cheeky happiness made
Like late mail, barely, carrying its special memos
Out to anyone, but few received. All my friendships; all my family, so
half received me and I was like an anthill scattering. But what is so Sexual about wanting
swell
scatter? Or different treatments? Or chores? that old Victorian femme-only
Faint way I, no Female, could use Faint excusing me from lawn’s hell?
No heaven fell, but It was just Childish thinking; (Unfair?) Now I sit, crow-symbolic, still,
thirty, Proto to a kind of Second Puberty, trapped, not yet in gender’s manual traffic,
But in my own poem. This is progress. Just to be writing again any one poem.
But I was saying something about fire—(fire ants, rage?)
How they do their cryptic, patient work in spiraled pairings.
The poem opens with a retrospective self-critique:
I guess I’ve been androgynous (in that ugly way) all my days,
I didn’t know. No one said Know it.xxxiv
What is “that ugly way”? And why, from here, is it deemed ugly? Is it ugly retrospectively, from the viewpoint of a present, more self-determined self? Who is the “no one” who is the beholder here? It suggests a consciousness of external expectations and judgment, which transforms as the poem proceeds.
But I mowed my green lawns well/ ashamed:xxxv
The lawn is the exterior, public-facing periphery; what is encountered as, perhaps, a first impression; it is the façade that precedes the face. It is most often regarded from the perspective of the outside observer: the view from the curb, if you will, rather than the view from inside the house. Lawn-mowing is generally understood to be the (somewhat) domestic labor of men, as the lawn is the zone in which the private domain of the home meshes with the public sphere. Successfully maneuvering the machinery of the task is an achievement. Thus, if the lawn is mismanaged or untended, it is clear that somebody up in here is “doing man” all wrong.
my buoyant, gay labor, like a crow flies, sweated for future.xxxvi
Threading through this collection is the idea of being (something: woman, man, femme, masc) as a type of work; the theorists might call it ontological labor. Here, the labor is, at once, irrepressible and anxious. It is labor to progress, with no divergences, along the loyal parameters of doing-and-being as expected performance, fretful about what might lie ahead on this trajectory.
so I felt insufficiently male.xxxvii
The speaker suggests that there are criteria for being male that she feels she failed to meet. The implication of inadequacy in (attempted) maleness points to a prior time, with an outmoded rubric for self-assessing, before coming into a deeper wisdom.
Ant imagery transforms here and thrice echoes the indelible image in “Disappointment,” an earlier poem in the collection, wherein the speaker asks mournfully,
Haven’t I disappointed
Everyone, Orisha, even the ants, look they desert me
with the repeal of my so-called genius?xxxviii
The evolution of the ant metaphor throughout both of these poems is a textual transing, as each successive interpretation—“even the ants,” “ants in a colony,” “an anthill scattering,” and “fire ants”—changes, retrospectively, how the reader understands and engages with all of the previous renderings.
In “Coming Back to Poetry (Or, Trans—?)”, the ants are first “Like ants in a colony:”xxxix they are of one mind, uniform in their needs, goals, and motivations. Then, the speaker is “half received” and, implicitly, half-rejected—with “half” also suggesting the acceptance of only a boy(ish), green-lawned half and the rejection of the fullness of this fledgling discovery: the questioning “Trans—?” and its ensuing “cheeky happiness” as relayed by special memo. As a result of being (only) half-received by “All my friendships; all my family,” “I was like an anthill scattering.” Singular collective nouns, like colony and anthill, work particularly well for ants with their innate commitment to the needs of the colony over the needs of any individual. The reflection “I was like an anthill scattering” indicates the colony’s unanticipated dis/rupture and disbandment—and perhaps a profound and necessary fracture in the mindset of the speaker. If, as an individual, “I was like an anthill scattering”—rather than “they were like an anthill scattering”—then whose needs, goals, and motivations now impel the life? Whose labor enables the being and the becoming? Who is left? How are they left?
By the time the ants show up again near the end, if you didn’t catch that volta, double back. It’s about to be unmissable, as something profound has happened, and it is poetry and clarifying and newfound self-sovereignty.
But I was saying something about fire—(fire ants, rage?)
How they do their cryptic, patient work in spiraled pairings.xl
Now the ants are fire ants and there is rage. Instead of a colony or an anthill, there are spiraled pairings, reminiscent of DNA strands. As if, instead of a whole colony of innumerable beings, all it takes is a pair; which might be paired iterations of one whole self, or the ability to fluently access a range of one’s selves.
But I was saying something about…xli
I am in love with this gesture. It suggests some time has passed and some things have changed during that time. As if I am in a wiser, more-myself place, so not only did I sorta forget what I was saying back then; as I attempt to recall it now, from this hard-earned perspective, it seems I must have been talking about fire ants and the power of their covert work, not an anthill a-scatter. And I must have been talking about rage, not recalling my despair.
The powerful final couplet stands as further evidence that “This is progress,” as declared in the previous line: that I am “trapped,” yes; I am “Proto to a kind of Second Puberty“ and “not yet in gender’s manual traffic.” As if to say, in this precursory stage, this nascent iteration of me is still in the realm of the soul. I haven’t yet made the kinds of changes to my body nor to other social interfaces that would be legible enough to alter how I maneuver or am regarded in “gender’s manual traffic.” I am, however, “in my own poem”—textual, even if not yet fully tangible–so that the anthill and its automata are no longer required in the same way; their approval and acceptance are no longer necessary.
“It occurred to me that I have a soul and that it is an immortal piece of me, that that is unchanging,” Laurentiis recalls. “And it felt necessary to be able to anchor into something that I knew wasn’t changing. At the core of myself, I am still myself. I just made a decision around sovereignty over my body.”xlii This is a testament to the potential of “the non-contingent self” as powerfully articulated by Prentis Hemphill. Rather than hauling questions like Do I belong? and Do I have value here? into every human encounter—and, thus, “putting [our] belonging on the line with a person with their own motivations and fears and doubts”—Hemphill calls for a practice of discernment, anchoring into an awareness of ourselves in which our sense of belonging is not contingent upon someone else’s willingness and ability to see our worth: “to belong somewhere much bigger than the human world or the human myths… a prior belonging, so that the belonging that you bring to interactions with other human beings doesn’t open you up for an existential loneliness.”xliii The journey from anthill and colony to the spiraled pairings of sovereign and non-contingent soul+body is one of true liberation.
As the poem concludes, the “buoyant, gay labor” of mowing lawns and keeping them green is supplanted by the “cryptic, patient work” of fire ants in their spiraled pairings, which evokes the deliberate and subterranean labor of becoming oneself on one’s own terms. It also brings to mind Marquis Bey’s application of Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity” to Black trans feminist consciousness. Bey writes:
Opacity refuses reduction and perfunctory transparency and preserves the singularity of those who are so often coerced into making themselves digestible. Opacity also allows for a kind of quiet (or loud) claim to something unable and unwilling to be given to others. Such a privacy is ethically important because of its potential for something like solace amidst regimes of violence. I am conceding the fact of opacity for those who live through the identificatory markers of blackness, transness, and womanness because it may very well be one of the few things keeping them alive.xliv
“The first idea was the first idea I had of myself. And I think we do have ideas of ourselves that wrestle with ourselves. So Death of the First Idea was a reference to that. . . . a kind of revisionary practice that would allow me wings to fly into the new person that I’ve become,” Laurentiis says. “So death is not final. It’s not fatal and it’s not literal,” she adds. “But it is an invitation to go through another door and just re-see yourself.”xlv
On the book’s dedication page, Laurentiis reveals the enticing prospect that Death of the First Idea is part two of a trilogy. This is a trilogy à la Dante’s Divine Comedy, as she has outlined in interviews—with Boy With Thorn as Inferno, Death of the First Idea as Purgatorio, and the next book as Paradiso. “Right now I’m working toward what the third book will be. I don’t know what the title is. I don’t have all that. But it seems like, ‘Okay, I’ve transitioned; I’ve done this, now what is it? Where does it go?’” she muses. “What does it mean to have transitioned and now have this voice? And for what?”xlvi
Much of Boy With Thorn was retrospectively transformed by Death of the First Idea. How will hell and purgatory be luminously transed in the light of Laurentiis’s textual heaven? However long it takes us to get there, I’m assured that it will be worth the wait.
Bibliography
Bey, Marquis. Black Trans Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory.” Feminist Studies 14, 1 (Spring 1988): 67-69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177999
Ellasante, Ian-Khara. “The Coalescent Body of Blackness in the Body of the Nation: Indigenous Lands, Black Bodies, and the Settler-Colonial Imperative.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, New Orleans, November 3-6, 2022.
Glissant, Èdouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Hemphill, Prentis, host. “Mini-Episode: A Non-Contingent Self.” Becoming the People Podcast. April 8, 2026. https://becomingthepeople.buzzsprout.com/1108100/episodes/18979712-mini-episode-a-non-contingent-self
Laurentiis, Rickey. Boy With Thorn. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015.
Laurentiis, Rickey. Death of the First Idea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.
Laurentiis, Rickey. “Rickey Laurentiis Reclaims Trans Identity Antecedents in Death of the First Idea.” Interview by James Morehead. Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast. date. Audio, 46:34. https://viewlesswings.com/2025/10/06/rickey-laurentiis-reclaims-trans-identity-antecedents-in-death-of-the-first-idea-interview/
Laurentiis, Rickey. “Rickey Laurentiis: Death of the First Idea.” Interview by David Naimon. Between the Covers. September 8, 2025. Audio, 1:59:55. https://milkweed.org/between-the-covers/rickey-laurentiis-death-of-the-first-idea
Laurentiis, Rickey. “‘Every time we close our eyes, there we are, in the dark.’ Rickey Laurentiis.” Interview by Anthony Borruso. Divedapper. February 3, 2026. https://www.divedapper.com/interview/rickey-laurentiis/
Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt
Ian-Khara Ellasante is a poet, teacher, and cultural studies scholar. Their poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, Obsidian, The Feminist Wire, RHINO, The Volta, From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Writers Write the Northeast, and elsewhere. Their critical writing, including the essay “Dear Trans Studies, Can You Do Love?” has appeared in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Pipe Wrench Magazine. Ian-Khara is a Cave Canem fellow, recipient of the honorable mention for the 2025 Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and finalist for the National Poetry Series 2024 competition. Proudly Black, queer, gender-infinite, and Memphis-raised, Ian-Khara is an associate professor at Bates College on the occupied and unceded lands of the Wabanaki peoples, the sovereign People of the Dawnland.