In this current era of the weaponization of law against transgender people,1 I found the beauty and heartbreak of K. Iver’s Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco fortifying. Iver is a trans, non-binary poet, but the poems in the book largely focus on their teen-age years when they identified as female and were in love with a young trans man who ultimately committed suicide.
These extremely difficult times we are now living in seem to call for poetry—even among law professors—because of its emotional immediacy, particularly its ability to transcend entrenched positions and arguments and to allow us to commune with others through the experiences poets describe. In this era of book bans and state-sponsored censorship,2 poetry and literature in general are perhaps less likely to have the wide reach they otherwise would, so, despite Iver’s book’s transformative potential, it may be unlikely that it will be read by many who are unsure about transgender rights or who reject them outright. However, as a trans ally and poet, I found the book deeply affecting, and I would highly recommend it to anyone.
The book describes the speaker’s beloved, whose birth name was “Missy,” as having committed suicide in 2007, and many of the poems intensely explore the years preceding that time, during a period in which the speaker and the beloved had a relationship that was off-again, on-again due to the speaker’s mother’s hostility.3 (Pp. 2, 59.) The primary timeframe described by the poems is thus before the explosion of anti-trans laws and legislation that started to ignite in 2018 and then launched in earnest around 2021,4 although some of the poems also address events in the speaker’s present, including the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the first Trump Administration’s trans-military ban to go into effect in 2019. (Pp. 45-49.) Both the poems addressing the speaker’s teen-age years and those touching on their more recent experiences viscerally bring home the very personal harms that anti-trans prejudice and the laws founded on it impose.
“Who Is This Grief For?” is a poem about more recent events. Like many of the other poems in the collection, this one is addressed in second person to the beloved. It describes the speaker’s deceased beloved, a former soldier (P. 48), as dying again due to the Supreme Court’s provisional allowance of the trans military ban:
. . . Years ago
I quit a job reporting
government affairs.
I no longer have to visit
the desks of suits who say
I don’t exist.But headlines now wait
from our phones. Last week
upon waking—SUPREME
COURT ALLOWS TRANS
MILITARY BAN TO GO
INTO EFFECT—you died
again . . . . (Pp. 47-48.)
The intrusiveness of news of devastating current events in our current digital age is brought home in this poem, but, more critically, the reader also feels the soul-crushing weight of anti-trans legislation through the poem’s recitation of the speaker’s emotional truth that the Court’s allowance of the trans military ban, even provisionally, caused the beloved to “die[] again.”
Earlier in the book, the speaker describes their joy being troubled–before the beloved’s death–by the immense losses imposed by familial and societal prejudice. For example, “Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Living Body,” is interestingly presented to the reader through stage directions. However, this unusual form does not let the reader avoid the poem’s gut-punch:
. . . . Cut to the motel, leaving its
light on for your red Bronco. Now the motel’s
dark interior. Now the bed nearest the win-
dow where you and a just-out-of-high-school
date can finally make contact after years of
parentally-imposed silence. I’m sorry. This
film can’t access your interior. Your date is
the only one directing her memory, Your
date is me. My memory is the shower scene . . .
. . . .Missy, this is our
last frame. . . .
. . . off camera the interstate is waiting and
my lines are let’s go. (Pp.15-16.)
The joy of the lovers’ first intimate contact, long delayed, is marred not just by the beloved’s later suicide (Missy, having killed himself, can no longer reveal what he was thinking or feeling at that time), but also by more immediate societal pressures. The speaker is torn between the joy and pleasure of the moment and the need to leave, presumably to placate her mother, who plays a central role in the book.5
The poem “god” is addressed to God and describes Missy’s funeral and the betrayal and erasure of the beloved’s family in only including,
[i]n the foyer, one room away [from the casket],
a decade-old portrait of him
in pearls and a black dress,
his expression proof
your goodness doesn’t extend
where it counts . . . . (Pp. 34-35.)
Poems like “god” and the previously described “Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Living Body” relate the absolute necessity of love and acceptance in a more intimate and visceral way than logical arguments could ever accomplish. These poems show us that joy and even life itself are at stake if the law continues to be weaponized against trans people. Overcoming this prejudice is a life-or-death necessity.
The poems in the book are not focused solely on grief, however. For example, in “Missy Asks Me What the Next Century’s Like,” the speaker describes the acceptance they feel during a writing fellowship in Wisconsin, concluding with the sentences: “They love us here, now. Right now, they love us here.” (P. 61.) These last words of the poem tell us of the joy and ease of acceptance, while also, through the use of limiting words like “here,” “now” and “[r]ight now,” of its precarity. Iver hints here that the acceptance is locational as well as temporal. It may fade away or be lost in a different locale. There is hope in how far we’ve come, and yet precarity, and this very precarity also suggests that the devastation and hatred that is in full force in some places now will also be temporary. At the same time, we have the sense in reading the poem that somehow the speaker’s triumphs and successes are also Missy’s.
Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco lets us intimately experience the joy and excitement of first love, the grief of the speaker’s having been kept apart from their beloved during high school, and the deep and unhealable grief that resulted from their beloved’s suicide. Iver’s strong and personal writing shows us love’s immense power and makes the wrongness of laws designed to hurt others irrefutable. As readers, it is as if we experience both the love and pain firsthand.
Most of the poems do not directly address law, although some, like “Who Is This Grief For?” and “Anti Elegy,” do. (Pp. 17-18.) “Anti Elegy” imagines that the beloved lived and gives shape to the beloved’s hopes that might have been realized if he had, such as “surgery” and “a new name.” (P. 17.) At the same time, the poem acknowledges that even these victories would have been fraught because “public officials would/still turn the fact of your body/ into arguments.” (P. 17.) The combination of imagining a long, successful life for the beloved and yet exploring the weightedness that would also lurk in the background is a powerful testament to how damaging anti-trans laws are to those whom they directly target. Yet, by envisaging a better, more hopeful present, “Anti-Elegy,” as well as poems in the book that rewrite the past in a more hopeful way, such as “Family of Origin Rewrite,”6 invoke the possibility of transcendence and change and implicitly urge us to fight for a better reality.
Even poems that do not directly deal with the law reaffirm the need for non-discriminatory laws rooted in love for our fellow humans. We see this is “Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Living Body,” where society, acting through parents and others, is a spectre in the background, constantly trying to tear these young lovers apart. We see the same dynamic in “Sleeping Beauty,” where the riveted beloved watches the high school-aged speaker’s ballet performance from the balcony, and the speaker laments that “the world/ won’t allow you to leave in his red Bronco,/ not anymore.” (P. 25.) This book leaves the reader with the conviction that the law must allow trans people to live their lives. Perhaps most importantly, it inspires the reader’s love and respect for the two young lovers at the center of it.
- See, e.g., Harry Barbee, Cameron Deal & Gilbert Gonzales, Anti-Transgender Legislation–A Public Health Concern for Transgender Youth, 176 JAMA Pediatr. 125-126 (2022).
- See, e.g., Marina Dunbar, Multi-Level Barrage of U.S. Book Bans Is ‘Unprecedented’, Says PEN America: Censorship at Local to Federal Level Recalls Past Authoritarian Regimes ‘But This Has Never All Happened at Once’, The Guardian (Feb. 7, 2025); Ann E. Tweedy, Bisexual Erasure, Marjorie Rowland, and the Evolution of LGBTQ Rights, 46 Harv. J. L. & Gender 265, 320 (2023).
- As explained on the Academy of American Poets website, “[t]he speaker of a poem is the voice of the poem, similar to a narrator in fiction.” Speaker, Glossary of Poetic Terms, Poets.org. It is conventional to use the term “speaker” when describing the voice speaking in the poem, rather than assuming the speaker and the poet are the same, although Iver has acknowledged that this book is largely autobiographical. See Megan Milks, Other Ways to Wear a Body: Transness and Elegy Intertwine in K. Iver’s Debut Collection, Poetry Foundation (Jan. 23, 2023) (noting that Iver has acknowledged that their poetry in this book is largely autobiographical).
- See, e.g., Mena Davison, Transgender Legal Battles: A Timeline: New Laws Regarding Transgender Youth Are Based on the Assumption That the Gender Binary Is Natural, JSTOR Daily (May 22, 2022); Tracking the rise of anti-trans bills in the U.S. in the Trans Legislation Tracker.
- I use the possessive pronoun “her” in describing this poem because it is the one used in the poem itself.
- In “Family of Origin Rewrite” (P. 31), the speaker reimagines their parents as supportive and compassionate parents who also treat each other well. In the context of the book and in light of the use of “Rewrite” in the title, the reader can infer that the actual parents were virtually opposite of those depicted in the poem.
