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Intimate new poems from an important contemporary voice

Following her latest book, What Becomes You, a memoir co-written with her transgendered son Aaron, Hilda Raz’s new collection of poems is an exploration of lives and selves transformed by choice and by chance. Formally and thematically diverse, these poems are testament to the will to redefine oneself in a world of constant, and often painful, change. Beginning intimately with poems of personal examination and moving gradually to the world of shared experience, Raz rethinks the structures of family and community while examining the impact of loss and growth. All Odd and Splendid takes its title from a quotation attributed to Diane Arbus, the American photographer known for her portraits. Raz’s poems share Arbus’s steadfast celebration of the strangeness in the ordinary, bringing us into contact with a beauty and pain that are inseparable when we see things as they truly are.

“This is Raz’s strongest book to date: a gentle quotidian view of the world that then twists toward the sardonic/tragic; or else a steady drumbeat of hard life, out of which happiness and beauty flower.”—Janet Burroway, author of Writing Fiction

“Hilda Raz's All Odd and Splendid is unique, accomplished, and turns the ‘genderings’ of the world upside down, as they need be turned upsidedown. The poems are psychologically innovative and deft. There are tones of a masterpiece in this work.”—John Kinsella, author of The New Arcadia

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From the Book:

Aaron has left the door open
behind his new backpack
hitched up on his shoulder
as he bends to enter the car.

I am pushing up the hill
what someone promised was wings
as he turned a wrench in the spokes
and bolted together new life.
—from “He/She: The Bike”

HILDA RAZ is the author of many books of poetry including two published by Wesleyan University Press, Divine Honors (1997), and Trans (2001). She is a professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is also the editor of Prairie Schooner.

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