The poems of Nora Treatbaby’s latest collection Our Air renegotiate sites of the ostensibly natural and how its elements are discerned, beginning with a wide cast by asking: where is touching? [1] Her project tends to the wild proliferations of places where the logics of institutions, typically not immediately visible, acutely overlap and intersect. This is, arguably, almost everywhere on Earth. To feel through these places, each poem walks along the book’s path of pages in bright green ink, through its sequence of long and iterative poems titled “Seed,” “Seed,” “Seed,” “Of,” “Tree,” “Tree,” “Tree,” “Tree,” “Love,” “Passage,” and “Hello, Earth,” among others. To read Our Air is to run one’s fingers along the tips of junipers, titties, or the façade of a CVS. Images flash by of a life, of being a trans woman who lives and labors within the extractive architectures of the Western landscape and late capital, vitally locating this sensory being through small vectors of beauty.

This reverent attention to the passageways of form is expressed lovingly in the object of the book itself as well. The title pages of Our Air are typeset in the font G.B. Jones, designed by Nat Pyper as a part of a series called A Queer Year of Love Letters. It’s based off the title card of The Lollipop Generation, a short film directed by Jones and released in 2008. The film follows a young, queer runaway and her peers, all of whom live on the streets of Toronto and signal themselves as available for sex work by sucking on lollipops. The inspirational text for the font appears in Lollipop’s title sequence. Between short shots of the runaway’s journey through the night, circular dots of light line bridges, gas signs and roadway arrows which transpose slowly into the opening credits. Those same small lights gleam on the book’s cover in the shape of the title and Treatbaby’s name. She sets out from the start to reconfigure what’s available towards liberatory ends, with a careful eye trained towards the possible pitfalls of insularity. Nothing about the book—ranging from its material creation to its wide stakes—is taken for granted. The necessity of the collective to creative deviance is always close by.

Undergirding the work is a love affair that Nora cultivates with Earth: “Earth is dropping hints / like ‘I’m real’ / and ‘love me’.” (12) Later on, in the first “Tree,” Treatbaby's autobiographical speaker asserts that she and the juniper “are lovers / I love you.” (55) This harmonious love is the most untroubled site of touching throughout, cemented in the final iterative sequence, wherein “Love made Nora. We were there. It was Earth.” (77) The troubling of love’s role as relation in this short sequence demonstrates a conflation that will permeate the remaining poems. If “there” references “love,” implying that “love” is a place and an actor but not an object, what reverberations might that have for modifying our conceptions of love? “It”—love—“was Earth,” and “we were there” simply by virtue of touching. Within this section, titled “Repetitions of Mistakes I Always Make Because Every Mistake Is the Same,” this love affair becomes one of easy synthesis able to hold a gracious forgiveness for those ever-same mistakes that foment Nora’s being.

But Our Air is still in a recognizably contemporary world, and even this expansive relationship brings love and being into contact with violence. For Treatbaby, this is constituent with the necessity of continual disavowal of capital, work, and wage (i.e., “One day we will be hurt in specific ways, like rent.” (19)). Part of the genius of Treatbaby’s poetics is their ability and willingness to separate material borne of oppressive conditions from those practices themselves. She does so aptly, without abandoning her guiding principles of historical materialism. This distinction, at times, productively divorces the landscape from the epistemology it was “made” for, opening it for experience outside of dominant ascriptions. [2] The collection’s opening lines are striking in this capacity, as

nature is a pill

I was made to swallow it.

have I nothing to do with

what’s inside of me? (1)

The immediate distillation of nature into a pill, in combination with the work’s somewhat ironic concerns with transness [3] and science, [4] is in part rooted in queer theoretical discourses that produced concepts such as Paul B. Preciado’s pharmacopornographic [5] in the early 2010s. In her work with some of this thinking, Treatbaby is very careful never to name Earth or typically “natural” elements as “natural” throughout the rest of the book. The use of “nature” in these opening lines, then, can be reasonably assumed to reference the essence of the word itself, further invoking the possibility of contemporary cultural significators. As nature is a pill that Nora is “made to swallow,” she poses the pharmacopornographic construction of gender as being what her body was raised to imbibe and require. Within present condemnations of the ethics of transition, nature’s meaning deviates from Earth—its air, its fauna, flora—with increasingly reactionary connotations. Nora makes it perfectly felt that this “unnatural” cast is an artificial social reproduction as she reverses the motion of her having been made in part by a market force: she instead “made Earth swallow it…there is nowhere for any of it to go” (1). If she was “made” to embody this “natur[al]” gender, why couldn’t she naturally be made for another? The question itself is a point of origin for Nora’s ongoing propulsion to find a way “to do / with what's inside of [her].” [6]

Central to this effort is attention to the possibilities of being alive, and the pleasures that having a body still affords, despite “our air frothing with / subjugation.” (27) Luckily, the air is equally frothing with “balm”; Nora’s speaker finds immediate relief because, well, “at least the sky will / finger [her].” Ontological musing permeates “Of,” a thirty-five page poem composed of discrete single lines following the iterations of “Seed,” which carry a motif of the speaker returning to the self (“I need that the feeling of one’s own eyes not be / beyond bearable” (17)). In “Of,” a word of shifting relation and substance, we see the speaker observe her inward recursion, pausing so that she might examine and relay the contours of the self planted in “Seed.” By thinking and feeling these shaping forces through poetry, Treatbaby generates a recombinant, hermeneutically-driven known world, or a new way of knowing.

In “so turning” and “blurt[ing] floras,” Treatbaby accomplishes a voice that is at peace, both despite and because of these oppositional forces that formed her. It becomes clear that she is undeluded about being of both the Earth and all number of products of industry. “Air all air / is fresh you idiots,” (38) meaning, all the world, now, as it stands, is Earth, and we are of it all—even those things one would typically approach as artificial and thus, as “other.” These include (but are not limited to) “the / quasi-slaw of / store credit,” “airports,” “email ink,” “waiting room magazine piles,” “an / Apple store,” “Kroger,” “Chevy supremacy,” “Hulu,” “AirPods,” “Family Dollars,” “Tyvek,” “Google / Maps refugees,” and “Wawa,” all of which appear in “Of.” We are (playfully) called “idiots” for not understanding this.

Treatbaby's silly as she continues, staying with the trouble. Her humor interjects in moments most needed and least expected, providing for laughter when the source of harm at hand is so absurd as to hardly warrant a response at all. It works with summoning pleasure where grave foreclosure or rage might be the only other affects appropriately invoked. Throughout “Of,” in addition to twining industry and Earth, Treatbaby

…collapse[s] from

a fathom of [her]

own abundance in panties

(balls falling out). (23)

Reframing balls in panties as an “abundance” to be “fathom[ed]” posits transness as a source overflowing and plentiful which, as such, should be met with love, especially on this planet so presently concerned with scarcity. “All breasts / [are] equal on…planet lesbian,” (27) this planet which so happens to exist here on Earth. Treatbaby anticipates each dreary binary, and quickly displaces them through revelations so ambivalent in their assertions that they make one doubt why they may have ever disagreed. She admits to an understanding of tackiness in “use[ing] the word ‘body’ / in a poem” but immediately follows with the memory of having seen AMAB carved into a tree, then being ironically “rerouted to / [her] sexual god-form.” (30)

This of-ness, of gender and self, of Earth and capital, is present in many living now and so iterated endlessly in our relating with one another. In Our Air’s penultimate poem—after many sprouting celebrations of “Tree,” “Love,” and “Passion”—Treatbaby greets us in her new understanding with a page titled “Hello, Earth,” where she “aspire[s] to behave as if a beach” and “as if a pond.” This hope leads to a dialogic recollection of what took place between an "I" and "you." The section shifts primarily into past tense and consists of the same poem, permuted. Each begins “after the waterfall,” and narrates the same story in declarative phrases. It is almost as if the reader participates in remembering the same moment as it could have happened in many different ways. The poem then transcends that suggestion through iterative pace. In maintaining, stretching, and subsequently returning the poem to its starting length, it begins to read like spliced film (like “grainy footage” (66)), as though one moment has merely been variably condensed or multiply rearranged. The possibility of these events did happen in all these ways: “Every narrative is pliable to truth, eventually.” (73) Treatbaby trades in self-reference, calling the source action—a formative conversation—“resound[ing] the orchestration of that day.” (69) Re-sounding is the invitation of the poem, and Our Air as a whole.

In “Leaving,” Our Air’s final poem, Treatbaby’s re-sounding claims “we are continuous w angels, screaming,” (78) screaming through being, at last screaming, in the final lines of the book, so loud so as to subsume capital and commodified relation, "this is our time and thus [the scream will] overthrow / this loneliness, the gap between all things and say to each other we are each other.” (81) The dangerous tonality of the scream, seemingly so discontinuous with the abundant love present otherwise, is a symptom of “this world / [where] we have to fight to live the way we could.” Nora admits with hope that “maybe my other body / is free to give [time] away by breathing,” but the air does not yet permit that. We, as continuous with the angels, fear not for our own survival but for the survival of our expansive love of Earth and one another. Our collective scream, led by Treatbaby’s prophetic voice, cuts through time to rupture tempos of extraction and widen the embrace of the reparative. After reading, I find I’m overcome with the desire to variably sing and scream within her chorus.






Notes

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[1] Nora Treatbaby, Our Air (New York: Nightboat Books, 2024), 1. The title of this poem is “Philosophy.”

[2] In the current version of Treatbaby's biography, she writes that "She does not spend her time." This strategy appears in her day to day, then, as it appears here in the writing.

[3] The speaker states this concern as directly as “Is being trans / important?” on 56.

[4] Scientific logics of reason are reduced rather directly on 72 when the speaker jokes that, according to the “commander of Project Human / now that the world is real / science is nearly complete.”

[5] This term was coined by Paul (f.k.a. Beatriz) B. Preciado in their seminal text of contemporary queer theory, Testo Junkie. They define “the term [as] refer[ing] to the processes of a biomolecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity—of which ‘the Pill’ and Playboy are two paradigmatic offspring.” Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013), 33.

[6] Emphasis mine.