Time is the thing a body moves through

Fleischmann (Syzygy Beauty: An Essay) weaves together art criticism, poetry, and memoir in this introspective and poignant book-length essay. It circles around the interactive art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, providing both an homage to the late artist and an exploration of such issues as power, desire, and activism. Fleischmann writes that Gonzalez-Torres's "work does not simply endure, but rather replenishes itself, proliferating freedom, grace, and change." Freedom, grace, and change are themes Fleischmann (who prefers they/them pronouns) examines in their own life as they transition through genders and traverse a range of landscapes, from rural Tennessee to Berlin, along the way reconnecting with lovers, making art with friends, and searching for a dynamic understanding of bodies and identity that transcends traditional labels. Fleischmann also writes about taking hormones and moving from gay culture into a more gender queer scene. Throughout the book, Fleischmann articulates the power in finally becoming visible in a world hostile to gender fluidity, recalling that previously, "I never knew people like me existed, so I never imagined myself next to someone or not." Their remark that between "the epistolary or the journal, I try to have each at once" eloquently summarizes the form of a perceptive and compassionate narrative that beautifully breaks with the limits of genre and gender. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A sharp memoir that explores gender, identity, and other complex, timely matters.Even before considering the idea of binary gender identity as an illusion, this book would be difficult to categorize; it is an intriguing mixture of memoir, manifesto, arts criticism, and prose poem. The settings include Manhattan, Chicago, Tennessee, Seattle, and Berlin, with Iceland and Greenland on the horizon. Fleischmann (Syzygy, Beauty, 2012) offers different perspectives on one relationship that provides a focus, one that is "joined somewhere between the platonic and the erotic." Even theremaybe especially theredistinctions, categories, and motivations prove difficult. "I was born in 1983," writes Fleischmann, "and heard for the first decade of my life no mention of queerness outside of the context of hate and epidemic. As media representation and legal protections grew in the following years, so too did a queer cultural anxiety around political collapse, and a gnawing awareness that those protections were flimsy, insufficient at best.it seemed urgent that I resist the mainstreaming of queerness and sustain a more radical tradition, assimilation being a form of death." As a teenager, the author recounts experiencing the feeling, "I'm hideous and I'm gay," and how they made pilgrimages to New York and Chicago to explore the limitless possibilities of identity, subsequently discovering that there "are actually rural pocketsall over the country, of weird peopledoing all sorts of odd things in places you wouldn't expect." Throughout the book, identity remains as fluid as gender, as the author investigates both in interesting ways. Providing a reference point across the text is the work of gay artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose art has inspired the author to interpret personal experience and response through the lens of queer relationships.Both provocatively and evocatively written, the book illuminates the process of becoming. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.