space neon neon space

The space between these pages is bright and dripping with neon. luna rey hall’s collection space neon neon space is a love letter to a breaking body. In this book, gender is transformed and painted in the brightest lavender, and the speaker must learn to escape the societal violence of labeling anything they fear enough to try and contain. hall is unafraid of fighting back, writing “…call me torrent, / downpour/ i snip…” This collection is a monsoon, flooding our expectations of gender. May no man in charge of our laws find peace in these pages; they were always meant to drown.

—Jason B. Crawford

luna rey hall’s poems are complex refusals: of expectation; of gender performance; of binary ways of thinking, knowing, and being. At the same time, they are rife with seemingly binary contradiction: light in the darkest depths of the ocean, velvet on antlers, violence and love. Seemingly, because none of these things, hall expertly shows us, are actually contradictory at all. In this collection, hall wrestles with the self that both is and is not the body, working through the reality of queer pain while actively demanding narratives that detail its opposite: “a queer-ass story, / with queer-ass characters, / in a queer ass setting…/ & there ain’t a hint of trauma.” These are poems of radical becoming. At every turn, hall resists who and how their loved ones want them to be, refusing to write “poems that make someone say ‘son’” and instead asking complicated questions—what does it mean to transition if your loved ones still dream you didn’t? how does one define the self in the absence of language, or when the language available is inadequate?—that have no easy answers, only queer ones. hall’s poems challenge us, implicitly and visually, to sit in the spaces that uncertainty—which is really possibility—makes; to look at gender and sexuality like the water that permeates this glittering collection: a boundless, beautiful paradox, capable of occupying any and every shape.

—Raye Hendrix