Baedling

There are places on the edges of cities, just beyond the fringes of vision, where our sense of the real and possible distorts. “Baedling” -- titled after an obscure Old English word referring to a third sex/gender -- goes there, in the train tunnels and along post-industrial riverbanks, and lingers. Braiding ecology, transness, and neurodivergence, these poems move across a dreamscape version of Northern Jersey, investigating its forgotten and imaginary inhabitants, extending curiosity and care. Yet the speakers of these poems remain aware of the power that voice and gaze confer on their holder, choosing to ask again and again how we might turn that power against itself in service of the surreal, the abandoned, the obscure.