ABOUT THIS BOOK

A debut essay collection that upends our notions of loneliness, wilderness, and liberation

Transanything reveals a world in metamorphosis. A hermit crab retires its shell, lovers drift apart, and seasons churn, all amid Ever Jones’s own narrative of midlife gender transition.

Jones takes up a tradition of writing—about the American landscape, solitude, wilderness, and the West—long intertwined with colonialism and heteropatriarchy, and makes it wholly their own. A self-proclaimed “nature essay” misbehaves, wandering away from the hummingbird outside Jones’s window. In their chronicle of a week in Yellowstone, Jones navigates trails frequented by grizzlies and a campground where their identity is regarded as equally dangerous. Elk, bison, and bark spiders roam this book’s pages, but it is the gray wolf—the embattled apex predator of the American West, narrow survivor of settler colonial violence, and vessel for American myths of independence—who emerges as Jones’s shapeshifting coprotagonist.

Taking on a global web of colonial systems that seek to divide us, Jones disrupts loneliness and forges space for queerness and transness to be aliveness—to be transanything.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

EVER JONES is a professor of creative writing at the University of Washington Tacoma. Their poetry books includenightsong and Wilderness Lessons.

REVIEWS

“Queerness and transness come alive in this wild and fragmented narrative that lives in the in-between.” —Autostraddle

“Transanything uses collage, fragment, nonce, and hermit crab forms to invoke an ‘unbetweeness’ that serves to undermine anything resembling a central, institutional authority. The aliveness of this book has an ethic, a power, inspired by love. As a queer reader, I am filled with relief, with gratitude, with a sense of my own presence, and release.” —Miah Jeffra, author of American Gospel

“Here essays float like balloons and climb like spiders, as the howl of grief opens up the landscape for reflection and refraction, moving beyond fear to claim an embodied truth.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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