Across the halfnull sky, Neutrøis remains unmarketable by the other, a relation of the third kind.
The whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished.
Still, one must trans. On and. On and. On and. On and.
In Neutrøis, Syd Zolf makes monstrously queer assemblages of nonbinary trans life. Neutrøis is a refusal of gender and a revisioning of the body’s markers, with subjects always trans-forming the labels pinned on them. Zolf composes a playful, emotionally layered, and subversive score gleaned from case studies on the “female transsexual,” tests that claim to decipher masculinity, philosophical writings on the “neutral/neuter” third person, immigration documents, and more. Employing cut ups, radical trans-lations, and other tactical moves, Zolf deconstructs and reconfigures normative language about transness, family, and nationhood. Suffused with births, deaths, border crossings, and other transitions, Neutrøis enacts a life-affirming fugitive becoming without end.
Syd Zolf is one of our most adventurous thinkers of ethnosexual difference in the era of humanity’s long-collapse into the spectacular abyss of capitalist rationalism. Once more, they teach me that to reach tenderness—for self and other—one must be willing to wrestle with the muscle (and gristle) of one’s historical formation. With characteristic mordant humor, plush wit and a remarkable attention to language’s nuances, Syd Zolf wrests the unexpected delight and thrilling eros of transition back into clanging grief, and helps us hear the eerie yet grand resonances between citizenship and embodiment, parenting and sexuality, the vitality of love and the evisceration of death.
This book is an invitation to examine the myths of the body, a provocation to reinvent ours, and a dare to perceive ourselves in unpredictable flux. Ultimately, it is a love-letter to the creature with which we keep company, as we merely play our roles within or choose to “sex the received theater” of this one life. Neutrøis documents a truth, which like gender, has been told slant, so we see it as a private inclination and as a collective, dynamic horizon through which we all must navigate. This book is an arresting and utterly propulsive performance of Zolf’s most audacious exploration yet of language as our fleshiest medium.
—Divya Victor, author of Curb and Kith
Syd Zolf’s Neutrøis blurs the line between writer and written, and in the slippages and distortions where the words fail, the poet emerges to become something other: ‘knotten,’ ‘shapefront,’ ‘A-merkinized (pubic wig).’ Written while ‘transing’ in middle age, confronting the state apparatuses of citizenship, Zolf explores a liminal, transsexual identity where the book, and thus the writer ‘neutrals itself.’ This is the one who witnesses the witnesser witnessing themself, a third thing, ‘a thirstspinning star’ on the forefront of a brilliant idiolect.
—Julian Talamantez Brolaski, author of Of Mongrelitude
In Neutrøis, Syd Zolf offers an unschooling in queer resistance where language shifts across formal registers, blurs embodiment, witnesses the in between, and, always, refuses to settle. These poems are alive, uncompromising, and surprisingly playful: an invitation to find something worth keeping in the ruins.
—Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl