Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Joy Ladin and Her Transmigration Poems

“The author is dead!” has been a consistent postmodernist refrain discouraging readers from reducing meanings of literary works to mere biographical outlines of their authors.

Joy Ladin’s “Transmigration Poems,” published this summer, goes against such a worldview, as the poems of the collection are intensely personal, confessional. The poems bring autobiography to the heart of the collection. They are the memoir of transition of Jay Ladin — father of two children, professor of English literature at Yeshiva University’s Stern College — to Joy. The story has, unsurprisingly, captured media attention, garnering the “Ye-She-Va” heading as well as more sympathetic notes.

The immense force of Joy’s writing is in the ability to calmly hold up the inevitabilities of the trade-off, unknowing, and confusion — and sculpt them into poetry. The consistently calm, steady tone of voice (marked through the usage of short lines and complete absence of exclamation points and question marks) given the context, seems impossible, intuitively self-contradictory, and thus wrought, pumped with tension and power that upholds it.

An immigrant — between continents or sexes — all too often uproots the old identity for the sake of the new one, or else gets hopelessly bogged down in the mire of nostalgia. To walk in the margins is hard enough; but to also retain the presence of mind (and spirit) to document the experience of transition is like trying to breathe in the cosmic vacuum. The rhythms of Ladin’s poetry are such cosmic breaths.

With one identity shed and the other not quite yet assimilated, at times, Ladin’s poetry trims off all matter of the physical existence, holding up to readers nothing but the frail, stark, metaphysical essence of the in-between.

Somewhere Between Male and Female

Somewhere between male and female

The soul gets lost
Where are you calls the mother of the soul
But the soul never had a mother

get back here this instant the father demands
But somewhere between male and female
The soul failed to be fathered

Male and female
Split at the seams
Leaving the soul naked

Criss-crossed with scars
Male scars and female scars
Breast scars and testicle scars

Scars like doors
And scars like fingers
Fingers point at the naked soul

Doors slam in its face
No
The soul is still alone

It is only dreaming
It’s been discovered
In the space between male and female

Where no one will ever find it

When You Leave Your Children

When you leave your children
To become yourself,
Your self leaves

To become a child. Calls to ask
When you’ll come home.
Sobs when you answer.

Your self will never understand
The emptiness
You couldn’t bear

Was the only life
You had to give her.
The self you thought

You would never have
Sobs on the other end of the line
Like a child who knows

Without being told
You are never coming back.

The Soul at 14th and 2nd

Cold but happy among the hundreds
Of other souls

Wreathed in the haze
Of roasting chestnuts

Souls buying socks souls buying chestnuts
Souls consumed by various hungers

And souls who drift beyond hunger
Each soul naked to the others

Revealed to the least
Metaphysical fold

By the shadowless light
That flares and glimmers

Like flame beneath chestnuts
When soul brushes soul

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.