torrin a. greathouse

torrin a. greathouse (Poetry) | Irvine, CA

Booking Fee:

Negotiable

Will Travel:

Anywhere

torrin a. greathouse (she/her or they/them) is a genderqueer trans womxn & cripple-punk from Southern California. Her work is published/forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, The New York Times, Poets.org , Muzzle , Redivider, BOAAT , Waxwing , & The Rumpus. She is the author of two chapbooks, Therǝ is a Case That I Ɐm (Damaged Goods, 2017) & boy/girl/ghost (TAR Chapbook Series, 2018). When they are not writing, their hobbies include awkwardly drinking coffee at parties & trying to find some goddamn size 13 heels. Find them on Twitter @TAGreathouse.

Chapbooks

  • Therǝ is a Case That I Ɐm (Damaged Goods, 2017)
  • boy/girl/ghost (TAR Chapbook Series, 2018)

Blurbs, Press, & Reviews

In boy/girl/ghost, torrin a. greathouse writes, “every tooth-filled thing opens / its mouth & the whole night / howls.” You. Me. Every tooth-filled thing. This stunning collection is an intoxicating examination of the body and its multitudes of survivals, extinctions, and rebirths. Deftly converging authenticity and craft, the poems collected here are each simultaneously blade and hand-woven lace. So awestruck by greathouse’s sorcery of language, I audibly gasped at least once upon each page. Let this book unbolt you.
—Jeanann Verlee, author of prey, Said the Manic to the Muse, and Racing Hummingbirds

Through an incredibly well-crafted juxtaposition of gorgeous, haunting imagery with brutal reality, torrin a. greathouse explores the ways in which absence can be held as a tangible object. Language is beautifully picked apart and dis(re)membered in service of dis(re)membering a self who never fit, who never made sense. “How far was walking out of boyhood from a grave?” greathouse asks, revealing the ways in which existing as a transgender person remains an ongoing process of navigating loss, grief, and an always-looming potential of violence. All I could think of while reading boy/girl/ghost was how thankful I am for this poet, for this poetry, for this truth put into words.
—Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, author of Outside of the Body There is Something Like Hope, There Should Be Flowers, and i’m alive / it hurts / i love it

In her collection boy/girl/ghost, torrin a. greathouse takes us on a journey to find softness, to find malleable understandings of language and of the selves who use that language, “i am searching for a soft poem in this mouth.” The poems in boy/girl/ghost implore us to question fixed forms, to see the danger inherent in confinement, in forcing the self to shrink in order to survive within rigid, socially imposed containers, “i took a pencil to my leg & tried / to see how much of myself i could erase.” Through stunning formal innovation, greathouse’s poems themselves become testaments to the freedom and power that come from sloughing off these constraints. Her poems become maps to new landscapes in which there is space enough to breathe.
—Paige Lewis, author of SPACE STRUCK

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