Jennifer Conlon

"The flathead fish—whose sex can be difficult to determine until maturity, which can take years—is a recurring image in Taking to Water. Jennifer Conlon juxtaposes this with human society’s insistence on assigning sex (and gender, accordingly) to children at birth, as the poems in this arresting book argue for an alternative. . . . The urgency here is as much about sex and gender as about the trauma, violence, and violation that, by ignoring them, society (parents, teachers, the church) condones, depending on the assumptions made about a person’s sex and gender. In poems of masterful precision and relentless interrogation past the surface of identity into identity’s beautiful complexity, Conlon asks “What does it mean to control your own body to con-/tort your own sweetness.” “My gender,” they argue, “is a war between layers,” going on to say that if rainbow means a spectrum of color, gender is a “dispersion of a body/of light.” Taking to Water is a startling, necessary collection; what Conlon says about gender’s spectrum can also be said for this book: “it will move across you do not be afraid.”