The Affirmations is Luke Hathaway’s fourth collection of poetry. He is a trans professor, poet, and librettist, teaching at Saint Mary’s University in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. This is his first collection since Years, Months, and Days, which was a New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2018.

This is a story, writes Luke Hathaway, of transformation. It is a death. It is a birth. / Birth, of course, is very terrible: what can survive it? The Affirmations is a work of trans poetics in the most radical sense. Begun in motherhood, in an experience of birth as an experience of affirmation, and continued through Hathaway’s transition, The Affirmations is a rerelationing with self and other, elder and myth. It’s a book about what happened when Hathaway fell in love—and about what happened when love shot the messenger.

The following excerpt is from “If You See Me Fall – after Se la face ay pale (du Fay)”  in Luke Hathaway’s The Affirmations.

If you see me fall
then you must believe
that the cause is love
and that love is all
that could make me fail,
founder in this sea—
and if I should leave
then the cause is love,
its billows and waves
gone over me.

If I seem to bear
more than mortal weight,
if I seem to wait
longer than is fair,
if I lie awake
know it is for him—
my beloved’s voice
knocking at the door
calling me by name—
who is not there.

If I see your love
how am I to know?
Who is he that you
should be smitten so?
Has he eyes of doves,
are they fitly set,
that you washed his feet
with your woman’s-hair?
He’s the one you stare
past in the street.