we cast shadows & other true stories, by brooklyn baggett

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

we cast shadows & other true stories is a deeply personal exploration of gender socialization and the pervasive othering and dehumanization that trans women experience. At its core, it is the story of aggressively challenging those ideals and actions. While primarily written for trans and gender-expansive audiences, the collection offers opportunities to bridge shared experiences of abuse, objectification, emergence and grief between transgender and cis-gender readers. 

The collection combines free verse and queer form with mixed media pieces. This queer form rejects and subverts the historical straight, white, male criteria of what makes valuable poetry. While the poems provide an anchor, the mixed media pieces present a more layered, intimate experience of emotion. Each piece is handmade from personal materials– three-dimensional poems representing the complex, and often conflicting, internal relationship between wanting to belong and finding the peace of trans euphoria.

Ultimately, we cast shadows & other true stories gathers up the incredible power and resilience of trans women and emphatically states “we are complex. we exist. and our existence is necessary.”

brooklyn baggett (she/her) is a trans poet, photographer, and artist living in New York City. She holds an MFA from Goddard College and teaches workshops on tactile poetry, challenging cis-het norms, and online marketing for writers. Her work has appeared in Yellow Arrow Journal, samfiftyfour, Impossible Archetype, Big Muddy, and River Styx, among others. brooklyn is dedicated to the radical act of being herself and lifting the voices of trans poets. brooklyn founded new words {press}: a trans and gender-expansive poetry & hybrid journal (www.newwordspress.com).