Masculinity Parable by Myles Taylor
Reviewed by francxs gufan nan
At once tender and tough, the poems in Myles Taylor's Masculinity Parable (Game Over Books, 2023) ask what it means to be transmasculine when, too often, manliness and violence are entwined. This collection is punchy—as ready to square-up for a long work shift as to marvel at queer lovemaking.
Throughout the three sections of Masculinity Parable, Taylor's speakers examine how they can affirm the gender they've sought since childhood, while also rejecting stereotypical scripts rooted in toxic masculinity. Taylor, in a March 2024 interview, shared, "The sections of the book are based around my journey transitioning. The first section is realizing I want to go on testosterone. The middle is me being on testosterone and going through a second puberty. The third being like, OK, I pass as a man, like, now what? Because that's a power that you have to use properly."
Transitioning genders, then, isn't merely self-actualization. Rather, it's a re-attuning to one's surroundings and asking oneself: What is my responsibility to those around me? In the climactic final poem of the first section, Taylor's speaker distills down their answer to this question. Arriving at a Planned Parenthood for an appointment to receive gender-affirming care, the poem's speaker wades past various types of men—menacing, anti-abortion protesters, then two friendly security guards—before wondering what it means to be a man himself:
I decide,
if I am here
to be anything,
it's those guards
at the entrance.
[...] I wanna say,
if there are no good men,
I'm gonna make one;
myself.
Using terse lines of little more than 3 words, Taylor slows time to a crawl. Though their speaker passing through the men's gauntlet could have registered barely a passing thought, Taylor takes the time for their speaker to deliberate. In turn, Taylor offers the reader a similar opportunity to slow down and weigh intentional decisions about who they want to be, and how they want to impact those around them.
Across the collection, Taylor's speakers change voices as their physical voice changes due to being on testosterone. The tone of their poems ranges from somber to silly to serene. Some speakers ooh and aah with childlike wonder for summer in Boston or emptied cicada shells. Others seethe with righteous indignation towards senseless trans death. While the bodies of Taylor's poems follow standardized lettering, in their poem titles, Taylor switches up the capitalization choices to reflect these varied voices. Titles fluctuate between the softnesses of all-lowercase ("poem with only a little bit of sacrilege"); the bold declarations of title case ("If You Think Bodies Are Static You Have Clearly Never Had Queer Sex"); the lung-fried shouts of all-caps ("THIS SUMMER HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BE MIRACULOUS"); and even, amidst the last few poems, the relative quietude of standard mixed case ("There's a woman looping longhand on this train & I think,"). By playing around with typography in their poem titles, Taylor depicts feelings big and small, mirroring the rise and fall of hormonal changes.
Cataloging queer joy and queer aches alike, Taylor's speakers flex their muscles to carve space for tenderness under the heavy yoke of capitalism. In "The Line," set in the back of a busy restaurant, Taylor's speaker meditates:
Trans-competent bosses are so rare, I never get two
in a row. I work and work and try to stay gentle
and pull my muscles and wreck my body because
I find a boss that sees me as a human first,
a guy second, and there is no third.
Here, Taylor's is a candid voice that deftly balances pro-worker jabs with the subtle use of poetic devices. In this excerpt, illustrating the rare prospect of two trans-competent bosses back-to-back, Taylor plays with the rule of three: the doubled "work and work and" nearly squashes its third—the speaker's attempts to "stay gentle"—before returning to repetition in "and pull my muscles and wreck my body." Likewise, in the following stanza, there literally is "no third." Just as their speaker feels trapped by the risk of never finding another, better situation, Taylor's rhythmic lines nearly bulldozes their speaker's humanity and tenderness.
Best of all, Taylor excels at coaxing their reader to imagine new worlds by employing antithesis. Throughout their poems, Taylor applies tension to what is based on what isn't. In the very first poem of the book, "a poem of only lies," Taylor catalogs a page-and-a-half list of memories and dreams, even while the title negates each one. Later, in one of my favorite poems in the collection, "poem envisioning the opposite of violence," Taylor reimagines hurt as harmless: burn scars wash off with soap; bruises peel off with ease; a face-down bird is actually just napping before it reanimates into song. Lastly, in the first poem of the final section, Taylor writes in the very first lines:
So here is the simple truth: I was a girl until I wasn't. I was a wasn't until
I was. What I was, then, had to be a boy. But that isn't very helpful. The
simple truth: I lead with the negative. I lead with non-ness, who I am not
yet, where I will not be, what I do not have. All I can call myself is not.
By playing with opposites, Taylor allows their reader to question binaries. Though introduced as a "simple truth," Taylor goes on to complicate their gender journey through repetition of "was" and "wasn't" in rapid succession. Even the alternative, defining oneself against what one isn't—"My gender is negative space / around a want I can't even make out the shape of / sometimes, a smoked line," as another poem says—can be complicated. Knowing what someone is not doesn't necessarily elucidate what someone is. Too often, trans people are asked for their gender as an either/or: are you a girl or a boy? But gender identity can be fluid, too difficult to capture with merely is/is not.
In the last poem of the collection, "ANTI-ELEGY FOR ALL THE TRANS PEOPLE WHO ARE STILL ALIVE," Taylor's speaker alludes to their all-too-familiar scenario of mourning a "dead trans friend." But then, seven lines into the poem, the speaker turns the reader's attention away from elegy, saying, "but I don't want / to talk about that right now. / I want to talk about the moment after," shifting instead into describing small moments of joy amidst the grief, surrounded by friends coming and going. In the poem's final lines, Taylor writes:
& then they leave,
knowing that if we have survived this long,
we can do anything they could have done
& more.
In these lines, as well as throughout the poem, the speaker shrouds who exactly "they" and "we" are. Taylor’s words apply to the specific and the scopic. They could mean the mourners and well-wishers leave, or they could mean a trans friend dies, leaving this world. Overall, Taylor's message is that trans survivors carry on weathered hope and resilience for their late comrades, looking towards the future for possibility.
These poems live as much in the body—creaking knees, sliced fingers, needle-jabbed fat—as in an imagined, improved future. Taylor reminds us at the end of his second section, in the poem "If You Think Bodies Are Static You Have Clearly Never Had Queer Sex:" "Queering reality is deciding / the options we get aren't good enough, and doing something about it." Here, queerness is a verb—the action of re-imagining the gender binary’s limited options. The long title that is a complete sentence pokes fun at the stale ways the cisheteronormative imagination views bodies. Queer sex, on the other hand, is dynamic and fun, highlighting how boundless bodies are. Miles Taylor's Masculinity Parable maps our present reality—the daily and systemic dangers of transphobia and binary-thinking—while giving glimpses into another, more expansive way of living.
Throughout the three sections of Masculinity Parable, Taylor's speakers examine how they can affirm the gender they've sought since childhood, while also rejecting stereotypical scripts rooted in toxic masculinity. Taylor, in a March 2024 interview, shared, "The sections of the book are based around my journey transitioning. The first section is realizing I want to go on testosterone. The middle is me being on testosterone and going through a second puberty. The third being like, OK, I pass as a man, like, now what? Because that's a power that you have to use properly."
Transitioning genders, then, isn't merely self-actualization. Rather, it's a re-attuning to one's surroundings and asking oneself: What is my responsibility to those around me? In the climactic final poem of the first section, Taylor's speaker distills down their answer to this question. Arriving at a Planned Parenthood for an appointment to receive gender-affirming care, the poem's speaker wades past various types of men—menacing, anti-abortion protesters, then two friendly security guards—before wondering what it means to be a man himself:
I decide,
if I am here
to be anything,
it's those guards
at the entrance.
[...] I wanna say,
if there are no good men,
I'm gonna make one;
myself.
Using terse lines of little more than 3 words, Taylor slows time to a crawl. Though their speaker passing through the men's gauntlet could have registered barely a passing thought, Taylor takes the time for their speaker to deliberate. In turn, Taylor offers the reader a similar opportunity to slow down and weigh intentional decisions about who they want to be, and how they want to impact those around them.
Across the collection, Taylor's speakers change voices as their physical voice changes due to being on testosterone. The tone of their poems ranges from somber to silly to serene. Some speakers ooh and aah with childlike wonder for summer in Boston or emptied cicada shells. Others seethe with righteous indignation towards senseless trans death. While the bodies of Taylor's poems follow standardized lettering, in their poem titles, Taylor switches up the capitalization choices to reflect these varied voices. Titles fluctuate between the softnesses of all-lowercase ("poem with only a little bit of sacrilege"); the bold declarations of title case ("If You Think Bodies Are Static You Have Clearly Never Had Queer Sex"); the lung-fried shouts of all-caps ("THIS SUMMER HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BE MIRACULOUS"); and even, amidst the last few poems, the relative quietude of standard mixed case ("There's a woman looping longhand on this train & I think,"). By playing around with typography in their poem titles, Taylor depicts feelings big and small, mirroring the rise and fall of hormonal changes.
Cataloging queer joy and queer aches alike, Taylor's speakers flex their muscles to carve space for tenderness under the heavy yoke of capitalism. In "The Line," set in the back of a busy restaurant, Taylor's speaker meditates:
Trans-competent bosses are so rare, I never get two
in a row. I work and work and try to stay gentle
and pull my muscles and wreck my body because
I find a boss that sees me as a human first,
a guy second, and there is no third.
Here, Taylor's is a candid voice that deftly balances pro-worker jabs with the subtle use of poetic devices. In this excerpt, illustrating the rare prospect of two trans-competent bosses back-to-back, Taylor plays with the rule of three: the doubled "work and work and" nearly squashes its third—the speaker's attempts to "stay gentle"—before returning to repetition in "and pull my muscles and wreck my body." Likewise, in the following stanza, there literally is "no third." Just as their speaker feels trapped by the risk of never finding another, better situation, Taylor's rhythmic lines nearly bulldozes their speaker's humanity and tenderness.
Best of all, Taylor excels at coaxing their reader to imagine new worlds by employing antithesis. Throughout their poems, Taylor applies tension to what is based on what isn't. In the very first poem of the book, "a poem of only lies," Taylor catalogs a page-and-a-half list of memories and dreams, even while the title negates each one. Later, in one of my favorite poems in the collection, "poem envisioning the opposite of violence," Taylor reimagines hurt as harmless: burn scars wash off with soap; bruises peel off with ease; a face-down bird is actually just napping before it reanimates into song. Lastly, in the first poem of the final section, Taylor writes in the very first lines:
So here is the simple truth: I was a girl until I wasn't. I was a wasn't until
I was. What I was, then, had to be a boy. But that isn't very helpful. The
simple truth: I lead with the negative. I lead with non-ness, who I am not
yet, where I will not be, what I do not have. All I can call myself is not.
By playing with opposites, Taylor allows their reader to question binaries. Though introduced as a "simple truth," Taylor goes on to complicate their gender journey through repetition of "was" and "wasn't" in rapid succession. Even the alternative, defining oneself against what one isn't—"My gender is negative space / around a want I can't even make out the shape of / sometimes, a smoked line," as another poem says—can be complicated. Knowing what someone is not doesn't necessarily elucidate what someone is. Too often, trans people are asked for their gender as an either/or: are you a girl or a boy? But gender identity can be fluid, too difficult to capture with merely is/is not.
In the last poem of the collection, "ANTI-ELEGY FOR ALL THE TRANS PEOPLE WHO ARE STILL ALIVE," Taylor's speaker alludes to their all-too-familiar scenario of mourning a "dead trans friend." But then, seven lines into the poem, the speaker turns the reader's attention away from elegy, saying, "but I don't want / to talk about that right now. / I want to talk about the moment after," shifting instead into describing small moments of joy amidst the grief, surrounded by friends coming and going. In the poem's final lines, Taylor writes:
& then they leave,
knowing that if we have survived this long,
we can do anything they could have done
& more.
In these lines, as well as throughout the poem, the speaker shrouds who exactly "they" and "we" are. Taylor’s words apply to the specific and the scopic. They could mean the mourners and well-wishers leave, or they could mean a trans friend dies, leaving this world. Overall, Taylor's message is that trans survivors carry on weathered hope and resilience for their late comrades, looking towards the future for possibility.
These poems live as much in the body—creaking knees, sliced fingers, needle-jabbed fat—as in an imagined, improved future. Taylor reminds us at the end of his second section, in the poem "If You Think Bodies Are Static You Have Clearly Never Had Queer Sex:" "Queering reality is deciding / the options we get aren't good enough, and doing something about it." Here, queerness is a verb—the action of re-imagining the gender binary’s limited options. The long title that is a complete sentence pokes fun at the stale ways the cisheteronormative imagination views bodies. Queer sex, on the other hand, is dynamic and fun, highlighting how boundless bodies are. Miles Taylor's Masculinity Parable maps our present reality—the daily and systemic dangers of transphobia and binary-thinking—while giving glimpses into another, more expansive way of living.
Frances Nan (francxs gufan nan) is 34 or thereabouts. They live in Seattle, WA, and are a fellow with The Watering Hole.