Review: Transposium

Dani Yourukova’s debut poetry collection Transposium has a striking cover: one that promises a fascinating book within. And the poetry definitely doesn’t disappoint; it takes Plato’s Symposium and brings it to life into modern form, incorporating concerns and problems from 2023 to make a playful, philosophical and thoughtful book.

In three sections, the titular Transposium, the longer Dialectic, and finally Alcibiades Chooses Their Own Adventure, it covers a wealth of topics that centre around queer love and longing.

The first poem of  Transposium, Symposium (Adapted),  sets out the rules, the questions, for the ‘what type are you’ quiz construction of this section, beginning with ‘You must answer all questions to the best of your abilities. We / will judge you by your answers.’ The poems then lay out seven Ancient Greek types the reader can choose to identify with, or ‘turn back to page 3. Take the quiz again.’ Love is the preoccupation here, its concerns, permutations and depths. In You are… ERYXIMACHUS, the trans body is considered and given space:

The body is an outpouring

of humours, and fluids, and grief. To love is

to heave that body against a foreign shore

and hope for the best.

The last poem of this section, You Are… Alcibiades, sums up the mood and feeling of the whole, with its passion and sexuality:

                                                                                                                                                … the taut feel

of a chord progression / wanting to come home / that makes me want to kiss her / in

this pick of sparks and struck nerves / and anguished winks in the dark

Dialectic, the second section, ranges across a wider set of topics but retains a focus on love. An intimacy pervades this conversation, weaving intellectual threads among more playful and impious notes. Jurassic Park, The Sims, a yellow Trademe jacket, Goodreads, dead plants and a snail in the toilet combine with Plato, Phaedrus, Pausanias, Socrates, Eryximachus, Aristophanes and others in a less framed section that allows Yourukova more freedom to explore where they choose.

In Driver’s licence, the passenger who is unable to drive muses on the ability of the axolotl to become a full sexual adult without metamorphosis, with the same lack of agency:

when they shipped the axolotl                                                             

across the Atlantic

from Mexico City

                                to the Jardin de Plantes

and Auguste Duméril opened the box

to find terrestrial salamanders

where the axolotl should have been.

Ten thousand digital ghosts in my pants makes important points on the multiplicity and identities of an (online) being, and the freedom of it:

It feels less lonely, to think there are thousands of

me out there…

… honestly, it’s kind of a relief for a moment,

it’s too hard to be a person with any sort of consistency,

In the third section, Alcibiades Chooses Their Own Adventure, structure returns: this is a pick a path endeavour and the reader is encouraged to read, choose a path, then go back to choose again and again. Sometimes you end up dead, at the footnote to the poems I AM SO HOT THAT IT’S PROBABLY DISRUPTING THE TIME/SPACE CONTINUUM or Alcibiades walks into a room. Other times you finish up in Love Poem for a Future, the last in the book, where we ‘control our own narratives,’ indicating a beautiful but sharp future as ‘a friendly cactus emerges / from my abdomen, / damp with blood, and / crowned with light.’

Yourukova uses humour and playfulness to perfection in this book. Take it seriously, they say. But not too seriously. The frameworks employed in the first and third section both intrigue the reader with their joy and intrigue, but also bring the collection together as a volume. Transposium is an impressive debut and should be widely read.

Reviewed by Erica Stretton