Zoë Estelle Hitzel’s Gender Flytrap is an authentic portrayal of the constant hurt that a trans experience in a toxic, hegemonic culture entails. Hitzel’s collection delves into the multifaceted nature of prejudice from the gendered stereotypes instilled at a young age to a broken healthcare system to the realization that everything—including transness—is filtered through a cisnormative lens. In this world, trauma is inherent to the trans existence. To see and be seen begets presumption and therefore is an act of violence, a violence that dictates how a person should look, act, and even perceive the world around them.
In this collection, bodies are their own entities—moldering temples furnished by others that forsake those locked inside. Here, trans identity is rejected by a world that weaponizes bodies to reinforce a binary of gender. These gripping poems explore the pain of confronting what could have been, how a rush of hormones in the womb determines the fate of a person. Here, we can ruminate on the suffering delivered at the hands of those who abide a prefabricated notion of sex and, absurdly, circumscribe what is possible for the person inhabiting a gendered body.
“Early on in Zoë Estelle Hitzel’s Gender Flytrap, she both catalogues and commands, ‘Hope to be just another/sound, a shiver/between teeth.’ This book enacts and then surpasses that insistent wish, becoming a generous and necessary collection of ‘the body’s wide-flung wing.’ How thankful I am that this writing of perseverance—which is to say, transition—exists. Buy it for yourself, then buy it for your library, then buy a copy and leave it on a bus or at a ball field. This ‘small sun’ is a gift.”
—TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania and co-editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics
“Whose body is this? Gender Flytrap says, ‘the body is territory that has been claimed, bordered, tilled, sold, and excavated.’ Zoë Estelle Hitzel’s words take those sales, borders, and excavations and pull an extravagant wildness from them. This body isn’t yours. It’s mine, she roars. I’ve never understood better than I do now, or with such elegance and grace, that our bodies, and our words, are not for the taking.”
—Nicole Walker, author of The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet and Sustainability: A Love Story