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Trish Salah

Trish Salah was born in Halifax, N.S. Her father’s ancestry is Lebanese. Salah earned both a B.A. (1992) and M.A. (1994) in creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal before completing a Ph.D. in English Literature York University (Toronto, Ont.).   Her dissertation (2009) is entitled: Writing Trans Genre: An Inquiry into Transsexual and Transgender Rhetorics, Affects and Politics.  Salah was an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg and currently (as of summer 2017) is an assistant professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, ON.

Lyric Sexology Vol 1 book cover

Poetry

Lyric Sexology.  Vol. 1

New York: Roof Books, 2014.
PS8587 .A319 L97 2014

Rev. ed. Montreal: Metonymy Press, 2017.

Publisher’s Synopsis (Roof Books)

Drawing upon Freud’s interpretation of the memoirs of the jurist Daniel Paul Schreber, alongside gender theories, polemics and case studies dating from the end of the 20th century to beginning of the 21st, Trish Salah samples and remixes the clinic and the club, dystopia and draughty apartments, re-presenting an emergent transgender subject in all (or at least some) of her/hir/his/their messy contrariness and queerly multiple biomythographies. One might even call this composite a syncretic strategy for building a conceptual, poetic world in a single volume. But, inevitably, more is left out than in. …

Poetry

Wanting in Arabic: Poems

Toronto: TSAR, 2002.
PS8587 .A319 W36 2002

2nd. ed. Toronto: TSAR, 2013.

Publisher’s Synopsis

… Concerned with not covering the tracks of her own metamorphosis, the author dwells in the contradictions of a transsexual poetics, in its attendant disfigurations of lyric, ghazal, l’ecriture feminine, and, in particular, her own sexed voice. Without a memory of her father’s language, the questions her poems ask are those for a home known through photographs, for a language lost with childhood.

Awards and Honours

2014 Lambda Literary Award–Transgender Fiction (Winner)

Selected Criticism and Interpretation

Capperdoni, Alessandra. “Phoenicia [not equal to symbol] Lebanon: Transsexual Poetics as Poetics of the Body within and across the Nation.”  In Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora and Indigeneity in Canada, eds. Kim, Christine, Sophie McCall and Melina Baum Singer.  Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012, 207-228.
PS8089.5 .M55 C84 2912

Links

Publisher Mawenzi House (formerly TSAR)

Publisher Metonymy Press

Publisher Roof Books

Trish Salah page at Queen’s University