A shape we’ve yet to namever

Mya Matteo Alexice is a non binary Black and white graduate of the Rutgers Newark MFA A Cave Canem fellow and pseudo librarian they are the author of A Shape We ve Yet to Name Game Over Books 2024 Their poems can be found in or are forthcoming in publications such as Pleiades Black Warrior Review Copper Nickel Hayden s Ferry Review The Bennington Review Barrelhouse Honey Literary The Pinch Cherry Tree underblong and elsewhere They ve received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation Fine Arts Work Center and They were the runner up in the 2023 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest judged by Gary Soto They enjoy video games where you can make the characters kiss. Ebook a shape we’ve yet to name a person Rendered highly flammable into a world of overwhelming social constructs expectations and historical legacies Mya Matteo Alexice inhabits many things in A Shape We ve Yet to Name Refusing to be embodied the way others expect they transgress shapeshifting into realms of the celestial the ancient and beyond in order to find personhood unmoored from x y They witness the horrors of forced conformity they find sanctuary in the thresholds of race gender and mental illness they approach each poem with a tender eye The title emerges from a poem pleading for freedom from binary existence they teach us to draw women with circles and men with squares draw me with a shape we ve yet to name Praise for A Shape We ve Yet to Name Mya Matteo Alexice s poetics is one of crossroads and intersections between across against race gender empire and belonging Do we belong wholly or in pieces to our history our families the traumas that shape d us or even ourselves In lyrically sharp branching and instructive poems Alexice probes and pierces the countless painful ways social and political taxonomies are inimical to the formation and cultivation of selfhood In A Shape We ve Yet to Name Matteo asks readers to witness and to be alongside as they become Watch close they urge Did you see me for just an instant birthing myself out of nothing These poems pry apart brackets bloom and burst across the page interrogate footnotes and ultimately name into being a stunning whole from a splintered inheritance Line after line vibrates with rigor and precision This is a book to teach and treasure for years to come Sarah Ghazal Ali author of Theophanies In Mya Matteo Alexice s A Shape We ve Yet to Name each poem is incantation and witness Alexice s poems rupture the page in both content and language Their poems dive into the fraughtness of race gender and belonging inside of society s narrowly defined terms Yet their words equally sing the glimmers born from all the world s blood Alexice s language is singularly theirs precise definitive and electrifying Here is a necessary voice in contemporary trans poetics who dares us to enter the depths of lived truths inside a watershed body a river mouth who refuses to be named River Dandelion author of remembering y our light Mya Matteo Alexice s poems graceful impactful shatter the borders and binaries that divide racial and gender identities divisions that have always been disingenuous to our lived experiences and harmful to our future selves A Shape We ve Yet to Name imagines a personhood unmoored from monolithic categories yearning for a place for people like me of my kind and color and iteration What a breathtaking debut Rigoberto Gonz lez A Shape We ve Yet to Namewhat if there is a name for me there a word I ve never heard spoken that describes in an unbreakable tongue what and who I am in a way that this English was never built for Poetry Well I wrote this So five stars baby Poetry A SHAPE WE VE YET TO NAME by Mya Matteo Alexice is a savored journey of amazing sensitive touching poems that linger in your heart They are a beautiful storyteller of themes of race gender belonging and family and events that shape us They tell the stories with such grace and creative grammatical constructs Highly recommend this book Poetry