Conjuring transitions

[Natasha]

Conjuring transitions

http://www.washingtonblade.com/2008/9-5/arts/books/13193.cfm
9/5/2008

For poet and 2007 Barrow Street Press Prize winner Ely Shipley, whose
first book "Boy with Flowers" will be out in October, poetry has been
a way to express issues of identity and gender since his youth.

Shipley, 31, who calls himself "gender queer" or a "queer feminist
transman," writes of "an endless chain/of colored scarves/unfolding
from the magician's sleeve" in his poem "Song." Like a magician,
Shipley in this evocative collection, filled with inventive,
dream-like images, conjures up transitions: from child to adult,
female to male, dream to reality — from the spoken to the unspeakable.