A big thanks to WESA and Bill O’Driscoll for the featuring S. Brook Corfman in the piece “Poet’s Award-Winning Debut Collection Explores Gender Formation.” We love S. Brook’s insights into the creation of the stunning poems in their debut poetry collection, Luxury, Blue Lace.

Much of the collection interrogates our culture’s need to assign a single, unvarying gender to each individual. In the poem “(The Crisis II),” Corfman writes, “When the therapist guesses my sexual role as if such a thing were certain, it’s not important whether she was right, I think, even though she was.”

Corfman says that one “anxiety” expressed in the book “is having to define yourself. Having to be put in a position in which you have to then say, ‘This is the role,’ right?” He adds, “What do we sort of lock ourselves into by saying ‘This is true now,’ without having a shared understanding that it might not be true later?”