We Want It All
coedited by Andrea Abi-Karam & Kay Gabriel
Finalist for a 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Anthology!
Finalist for a 2021 Publishing Triangle Award in Trans & Gender-Variant Literature
We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nov 2020, Nightboat Books)
A collection of formally inventive writing by trans poets against capital and empire.
Editors Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel offer We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics as an experiment into how far literature, written from an identitarian standpoint, can go as a fellow traveler with social movements and revolutionary demands. Writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, the intergenerational writers assembled here imagine an altogether overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.
Reviews
“The revolution may not be televised, but if you ask Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, co-editors of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, it will most definitely be sexy. A hundred times hotter than anything you’re likely to catch on Netflix, Abi-Karam and Gabriel’s anthology demonstrates that trans liberation can be felt through the ecstatic joining of policed bodies…”
To learn more about the process of creating this work and the radical intentions behind it, them. caught up with its editors.”
Click here to read the full interview with the editors!
—Wren Sanders, them
“‘shit, what the hell/ have I built,’ writes Zavé Gayatri Martohardjono in a poem featured in this exciting and frank anthology of works by trans writers… This anthology imagines poetry as a resource by which the community might stand “against capital and empire,” using language to reimagine collective struggle.”
“This collection is impressive in scope, style, and time, including intergenerational poets on everything from work to sex to pop culture. This is the kind of book you can pick up and read a few selections from, and be reminded that trans identity, like all identity, is vast and beautiful.”
“We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, engages and interrogates poetry as a means of trans liberation. Offerings from poets such as Ching-In Chen and Aaron El Sabrout “pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.”
—Poet’s & Writers The Anthologist
“If there’s one thing I can get behind, it’s more trans voices and/or gender fuckery in literature, always. This stunner of an anthology brings together an intergenerational mix of poets who expertly write/graffiti on that (imaginary) line of the personal and the political by exploring love, work, bodies, social justice movements, rage, tenderness, and pop culture. With creativity and insight, the poems in this collection are truly a rich tapestry that belongs on the shelf next to editor Christopher Soto’s Neplantla: Queer Poets of Color (which was also released by Nightboat, thank you Nightboat!).”
—Sarah Nielson, Literary Hub’s Bookmarks
What is the Project of Trans Poetics Now? Editors Andrea Abi-Karam & Kay Gabriel on Moving Towards a Revolutionary Practice. Read the full introduction to We Want It All at Lit Hub.
“Anthologies, like canons, often fall apart when looked at with any sincerity. The intention to encapsulate poets of a specific identity often fails in one or more respects due to the multitudes they contain. Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, co-editors of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, take up this problem of representation — specifically of trans lives… These are poems that do not compromise.”
“Groundbreaking and urgent, this collection features poems that investigate, interrogate and innovate trans relationships, embodiments, ecologies, emotions and expressions. It shines a much-needed light on the power of poetics in care, understanding and resistance.”
“This is an incredible and necessary collection of work that celebrates queerness and queer identity. The editors put it succinctly, stating in the introduction, “The title of this volume is therefore entirely literal. What we want is nothing other than a world in which everything belongs to everyone.”
—Joanna C. Valente, Luna Luna Magazine
“We Want It All is a big, unwieldy, overflowing book—in this particular moment, there is a need for excess to respond to excess; to the smug American Horror Story of overblown, overglossed oppression and hatred… Whether you love a certain type of delicately opaque lyric, or a litany of facts and/or bodily functions and/or daily minutiae, or typographical experimentation, or heartfelt declarations of self-love and self-loathing, there is something here to linger over, to savor and even to overindulge.”
—Heather Bowlan, The Anarchist Review of Books
“As they say in the introduction, editors Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel ‘wanted work that articulates a keen fuck you, and even in the first-person singular, invites an imagination of collective social and political stakes’. Yes! So much fuck you the fuck you radiates from every page. Brecht said Dante’s Inferno was truly great because you could read it outside: I don’t know exactly what he means by this but I love it, and want to say the same about We Want It All. These poems defy claustrophobia and alienation, going for the paradiso of fuck you, the leaves of grass of fuck you, the king james version of fuck you, the descent of fuck you, behind the fuck you of capital, looking for fuck you, my emily fuck you, my walk with fuck you, fuck you and class consciousness, in fuck you of my feelings. But nothing like that, too. Everyone’s going to read it eventually.”
The editors present this anthology as an experiment: how far can literature written and/or collected from a standpoint of identity. We see a new language and a new form to express the desire to shake the American public out of its lethargy. We see courage here as the writers face suffering. Pain is singular yet it reaches its targets one at a time. We live at a time of indifference and here we are reminded that each one of us is somehow responsible for everything that is done.
Jessica Caroline: “Reading Sensoria alongside We Want It All proved fruitful, even at the outset both introductions set up the parameters: Wark wants us to consider the production of theory as an end in itself: ‘a free and self-directed inquiry that takes its own time.’ Contrast this with Abi-Karam and Gabriel’s intro: ‘We believe that poetry can do things that theory can’t, that poetry leaps into what theory tends towards.’ I felt myself rewarding myself with a poem from the anthology after I got through a chapter of Sensoria, and each poem brought with it a direct or indirect correspondence.”
Click to read a conversation between Jessica Caroline & Erica Colucci about McKenzie Wark’s Sensoria and We Want It All!
Read Two Poems from the Anthology in Literary Hub!
“soon we’ll be people again” by Raquel Salas Rivera & “900 Chocolate Hearts A Minute At The Candy Factory” by CAConrad!
—Raquel Salas Rivera & CA Conrad, Literary Hub
We Want It All featured in The Poetry Foundation’s 2020 Staff Picks by Jeremy Lybarger & Noa/h Fields!
“Nightboat’s anthology We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics gave me everything I wanted and more, the perfect supplement as I started my hormone transition journey. The Zoom reading was one of the best virtual events I attended in quarantine—a riotous joy fest with a veritable who’s who of the genderqueer literati.”
—Noa/h Fields, Poetry Foundation Harriet Staff
“This is the Big Much Awaited Poetry Anthology of 2020. And it does not disappoint. It is generously, inclusively edited and full of both emerging and established voices. Perfect for those interested in how poetry can be a form of both community and self exploration at the same time.”
—Juliana Spahr, Stanford Humanities Center
“This book means so much to so many of us. The choice for the word Radical in the title is why I trusted the editors from the beginning. Radical as in, we care that much to be outside the respectable world. As though there was ever a choice, but still, care is there. I used this book as divination by asking it a question, then opening and closing it 9 times. These poets gave me the weird answers I needed. As Trish Salah told me two days in a row, “Is there a dare, a bid for love, a survival equation / lust for life unburdened of fear’s repetition?”
“What does it mean to want it all? In the first of a two-part conversation, Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, the editors of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, discuss poetry’s role in political movement, the anthology’s collective language, and its many threads of abundant desire.”
Listen to the editors chat with Montana Public Radio: The Write Question here!
—Lauren Korn, Montana Public Radio: The Write Question
Featured in November’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books from Lambda!
“Encompassing not just the United States but English-language writers from a multitude of other countries and backgrounds, this anthology is clearly impressive, and a foundational collection of exactly what it declares itself to be. If you are interested in where writing is going, or what conversations on writing you should be considering, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics is a book of endless possibilities.”
Mentioned in Autostraddle’s Lez Liberty Lit!
SKYLIT: Kay Gabriel & Andrea Abi-Karam, “WE WANT IT ALL” on the Skylight Books Podcast