Lover

Samuel Ace
She carries the garden tools to the hill and starts to
beat a hole       she finds a garland of roses full of ears
and salvage     a shield bush     a crown of peas and
a glass of juice     she has to drink that first     crown
the girl!     crown the two of us     heart and right arm
hair and toe     lip and anus     a chord trembles light
from belly to belly     it shakes in the wind but can't be
broken     oh girl     I choose you     see?     it is ours to
step forward     ours to heal the run of the wheel     a
simple sound     a coo     a clavichord     ear to breast
ear to field and sleep

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Samuel Ace is a trans and genderqueer poet and sound artist, and the author of several books, most recently Our Weather Our Sea, (Black Radish Books, 2019) and Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2019). He is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writers and Firecracker Alternative Book awards, as well as a two-time finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. Recent work can be found in Poetry, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He currently teaches poetry and creative writing at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts.

Brooklyn, New York

This re-release of Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. is beautifully framed by a love letter between the authors: 'Dear friend who is me and no longer me, dear love who I have never left behind.' Sam and Linda’s exchange underscores the deep vulnerability these collections open, as they invite the reader into their intimacies—from the shame of not being seen or understood, of being unsafe in a body, to moments of courage, fed largely by faith in the imagination, and to the raw ecstasy of exploring gender and sexuality from childhood into adulthood. Sam writes to Linda, 'In so many ways, your writing helped bring me into being.' I cannot help but feel I am witness to the germinal stage of a sacred rite."
—Ely Shipley

"The Ace of Spades represents the ancient spiritual hinge of transformation, but Samuel Ace transfigures or transforms to exalted beauty. One of my favorite literary minds, Ace, in his extraordinary new book, lingers long enough along the horizon while waving that we catch the light to watch his limbs her life loved into."
—CAConrad

"With Meet Me There, Sam Ace begins a new dialogue with the past, though it has long been his country—the way we embody and misunderstand it, long for it and desperately cast it aside. Meet Me There teems with violent honesty, beauty and horror, lust and stillness. An underground classic, it now radiates with added dimensions, a time-traveler, a crucial contemporary text."
—Michelle Tea

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