Splendor: Trans Poets (Calico Series, 14)

Introducing readers to five trans and nonbinary poets Splendor is an ode to queer bodies, with previously unpublished translations from Argentina, Denmark, Korea, Norway, and Quebec. From the irreverent and irresponsible to the quiet and meditative these poems decentralize our ideas of trans experience and poetics.

Splendor presents a sliver of the wide possibilities of what trans literature can offer. This is trans literature that transcends borders and binaries in order to engaging with a messy world. As Camila Sosa Villada writes, “Let us keep loving one another in this swamp of contradictions.”

Pascale Bérubé is perhaps an anomaly: a trans poet who is seemingly uninterested in stable gender assignments. She is more interested in transness itself, that is, what lies between and never quite resolves itself into an identity, a floating inside an indeterminate Being. To quote the final words of the first poem in her collection, Trop de Pascale: “je ne suis pas moi” (I am not me). Perhaps this could be described as a more generalized dysphoria, but, in the hands of Bérubé, it is above all a poetics, a reappropriation of Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre.”

Luka Holmegaard (he/they; b. 1990) is an award-winning Danish author of fiction, essays, and poetry. He made his debut with the novel Emma Emma in 2015, followed by Graceland in 2017. LOOK (2020) is a genre-defying work about the role of clothing in literature, in creating and reshaping gender, in political protests, in power relations, in sex and love, and in the precarious labor market. LOOK was critically acclaimed in both Denmark and Germany and nominated for the Politikens Literature Prize. The Ocean in Your Mouth is his fourth book.

Kim Sono (b. 1992) is a Seoul- and Berlin-based nonbinary poet working at the limits of language, sound, and the body. Their practice approaches poetry as a performative site where dreams, oral narratives, and fragmented archives circulate. Through stuttering, silence, and repetition, they resist fixed identity and linear history. They are the author of four poetry collections, Word Dream Body (Vookda, forthcoming 2026), Syncopation (ASIA, 2024), The Film Set (Moonji, 2022), and Night Soccer (Achimdal, 2020).

Ida Hove Solberg is a Norwegian nonbinary poet, editor, translator, and critic with a PhD in translation studies from the University of Oslo. In 2024, they published their narrative poetry book The Last Hare, which was nominated for the Prisma Award in the category Nordic Work of the Year. In 2016, they co-founded Mellom, Norway’s first literary magazine for translated literature. As a translator, they have worked with the poetry of Athena Farrokhzad and Rasha Abdulhadi, and together with Sofia Knudsen Estifanos, they translated Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin into Norwegian.

Camila Sosa Villada was born in 1982 in La Falda (Córdoba, Argentina). She is a writer, actress, and singer. She holds degrees in communication and theater from the National University of Córdoba. Her play Carnes tolendas, retrato escénico de una travesti was selected for the 2010 National Theater Festival held in La Plata. Her first novel, Bad Girls, won the Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro and has been translated into more than twenty languages.