A Song of Milestones by Jennifer Wenn, (Harmonia Press, 2019) is a chapbook from Harmonia Press, now an imprint of Beliveau Books (https://beliveaubooks.wixsite.com/home/books). A record of the poet’s journey, it is frankly and aptly titled. For its short length, it covers decades to retirement age, but poems are not vague. They zero in on key moments across the (now much underlined) 37 pages and 11 poems of the chapbook.

I like the poet’s effective use mix of metaphorical that brings us into the experience—with the dream “freighted down by/ custom and terror” and shame  (p. 6) or “phantom panthers prowling/ my emotional forest” (p. 27). The poems are immediate and concrete and figurative in turn. It is poetry of process and processing. It reveals the range of altitudes of the trip to get to the spot where “nothing exists except for me and the phrases.’ (p. 29)

Jennifer Wenn didn’t write poetry at all until she was nearly 58. At the LCP “On Intimacy” blog series Jennifer explains she was a late literary bloomer “because major parts of my spirit were, for most of my life, simply inaccessible.” 

The chapbook travels from childhood, feeling as an equal, unmarked, when spending time with a girl being to finally having gender confirmation, to reconcile the inner and outer, changing from caterpillar to butterfly. Or, put poetically as she does on a “surgical resurrection” (p. 22) “to extinguish an/agonizing duplicity of body and spirit” (p. 10). When the call comes, she is so relieved she’s caught in “the riptides of emotion” eager to lose “macho pronouns” and watch as the “oft-required male shell’s veneer” thins (p. 12).

There’s a celebratory spirit made complete by also including in frame the social challenges such as the “power embedded in shades of meaning” of pejorative and sensationalistic terms for gender confirmation and physical challenges of (p. 21-22) “piercing movement-triggered paroxysms/electric cattle-prod jolts/of reconnecting nerves.”

In an assigned males comics, the narrator asks, why would you be out as trans when you could disappear unmarked into the population? In her final poem Jennifer answers this herself in the same spirit as Sophie Labelle. Why risk drawing fire from haters? Because as a builder, as she comes out the other side, “[I am] igniting my own own beacons for others.” 

The advantage of literacy is having all of written history as cohorts and the poet calls out the companions of page of Whitman, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Maugham and others. And of adding to the annals yourself with your experience. 

Perhaps this companionship with classic writers informs the lush and formal language with lesser used vocabulary such as perfervid, surcease, pas de deux, borne aloft, and idée fixe. As a consequence of the vocabulary I feel I have more room to breathe inside the width of language expression. This comfort shows perhaps I read too much that was written for a “accessibility”, a controlled reading level that insists on present simple tense. Her poems go to show universal reach doesn’t mandate being simple in vocabulary and syntax.