Meet Me There: Normal Sex \u0026 Home in three days. Don't wash. (Germinal Texts, 3) by Samuel Ace

Meet Me There: Normal Sex \u0026 Home in three days. Don't wash. (Germinal Texts, 3) Reviews

• 
  Julene

  I LOVE this book! First, I knew Linda Smukler years ago in the 1970s, we were in a writing group together and I loved her writing. Then we lost touch. But her writing stayed in my mind and in a folder in my files.
  
  Every once and a while I did a web search, so I knew when these books came out, but for some reason I did not get them. Then I found Linda as Samuel Ace, and connected through Facebook. And now Samuel Ace has brought Linda Smukler's words back to us, as well as a dialogue between their two selves, the Linda that was the Samuel that is now, and how they have interrelated all these years from childhood.
  
  What a beauty of a book. He starts with letters written back and forth between Linda and Samuel, then Linda's two books, then essays from other contemporary trans writers and people who knew Linda like Joan Nestle, the founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, who I also knew. Thrilled at this hybrid poetry history that sheds so much life on the trans experience.
  
  Linda decided to transition in 1994. He now does word and sound poetry. Linda did prose poems, dense and rich with lots of sex. I am enthralled to read this book, to find the underlying emotions exposed. To hear the analysis from Cameron Awkward-Rich that, "we might think of trans as a particular practice of imagination, a reparative retreat into an expanded inner territory and an insistence that the life of the interior, "where I am the center," is a real life." (Using a quote from Linda's writing in Normal Sex.)
  
  We are in a new world, and it has been coming to us through history starting with any outsider. From the Beats to the Hippies to the Queers to the Trans. They are the ones who bring change. This book is a harbinger of change addressed in the best possible ways through one being who has spent a lifetime finding their true self and fighting for it through words and experience.
  
  I am grateful Samuel is back in my life (even if only through Facebook and his work) and exposing what Joan Nestle calls, "the human experience of time, the histories of selves." Joan says at the end of her essay, "...the ability to love beyond the borders maybe the only thing that saves us." Samuel himself confesses to Linda in one of his essays, “I went off searching for you because newly transforming, I was utterly unmoored. Linda, I did not want to be a man. I wanted to be free." May we all find such freedom.
  
• 
  maren

  when I try to pray my fingers are your fingers on the back of my neck
  
  — —
  
  kay gabriel writes that sam “gets his fingers slick and lodges them under your nose” & phew! yeah! “wake up and smell shit and heaven” hell yeah!
• 
  Megan

  These poems took my breath away. The intensity of their desire (esp. in Home in three days. Don't wash.) is hot hot hot and often quite brutal. This new joint edition includes a moving introduction -- letters between Sam and Linda -- and a range of short essays at the back by peers and descendants from Eileen Myles and Pamela Sneed to Cameron Awkward-Rich and Andrea Lawlor.
• 
  Cal

  i liked this book a lot. it’s a republication of two books written by Linda Smukler in the 90s who later transitioned and is now Sam Ace. They are both listed as coauthors of the book, and the book begins with letters between them. Ace and Smukler discuss everything from identity to poetry to time and back round again.
  
  The two books, Normal Sex and Home in three days. Don’t wash., are experimental and borderless in a way that is undeniably trans. Reading them, you can see the breadcrumbs (and often, whole loaves) of a person grappling with genderqueerness. It’s beautiful and interesting to read the poems and know how the story ends even when the author herself did not.
  
  What I love most about this book is that it is unapologetic about trans / lesbian sex and desire. Some poems are disgusting, but so too is the erotic. Too often, lesbian sex is either for men, or sanitized beyond recognition. But here dyke desire is presented in all of its multifaceted and disgusting glory.
  
  some of the poems weren’t really for me, and i didn’t always love the style, but this book is deeply important trans lit, and will stay with me.
• 
  lou

  a beautifully edited and compiled volume— the raucous and breathless and raunchy and honest poems framed by thoughtful dialogue between the author & his past self, and by thoughtful criticism from other trans poets. the kind of poems i wish i could write, i will be returning to this volume again & again
• 
  ally

  this is my all-time favorite book
  
  read it
• 
  max

  It has been a long time since a text spoke to me so viscerally about desire, self, and dreaming things into existence. So so so good, and love the bonus odes to Sam Ace essays at the end
• 
  Gwen

  2.5