Poetry
ZOM-FAM
- Publisher
- Metonymy Press
- Published
- September 10, 2020
- Pages
- 120
- Price
- $17.95
- ISBN
- 9781999058845
- Language
- English
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The team behind the book
- Cover
- Aun Li, Kai Yun Ching
In their debut poetry collection, Kama La Mackerel mythologizes a queer/trans narrative of and for their home island, Mauritius. Composed of expansive lyric poems, ZOM-FAM (meaning “man-woman” or “transgender” in Mauritian Kreol) is a voyage into the coming of age of a gender-creative child growing up in the 80s and 90s on the plantation island, as they seek vocabularies for loving and honouring their queer/trans self amidst the legacy of colonial silences. Multiply voiced and imbued with complex storytelling, ZOM-FAM showcases a fluid narrative that summons ancestral voices, femme tongues, broken colonial languages, and a tender queer subjectivity, all of which grapple with the legacy of plantation servitude.
Emerging from a creative process in spoken word and live performance, these poems transform the page into a stage where the queer femme body is written and mapped onto the colonial space of the home/island. Interwoven with Kreol, ZOM-FAM showcases a unique lyrical sensibility, a musicality influenced by the both unforgiving and soothing rhythms of the ocean, where the poet enunciates the complexity of their displaced Indo-African roots, “the lineage of silence / that we weave in-between our intimacies.”
Striking, vivid, tender, intimate, and political, ZOM-FAM is a beautifully wrought journey that articulates a contemporary decolonial poetics and offers a roadmap for colonized and displaced queer and trans voices to (re)imagine themselves into being.
Description from the publisher Metonymy Press, seen in October 2026 · Source ↗
Also by Kama La Mackerel
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Sharp Pink Claws Kai Cheng Thom, Trish Salah, Kama La Mackerel, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, Grace Kwan, Hazel Jane Plante, Shanice Nicole, jiaqing wilson-yang, Markus Harwood-Jones, H Felix Chau Bradley, Valérie Bah
-
The Rage Letters Valérie Bah
-
Self-Care Jennifer Bélanger, Antoine Charbonneau-Demers, Caroline Dawson, Marie-Claude Garneau, Marie-Andrée Gill, Zishad Lak, Kama La Mackerel, Pierre-Luc Landry, Éric LeBlanc, Karine Rosso, Ouanessa Younsi
From Metonymy Press
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The Sacred Heart Motel Grace Kwan
-
LOTE Shola von Reinhold
-
Personal Attention Roleplay H Felix Chau Bradley
-
The Good Arabs Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch
-
A Natural History of Transition Callum Angus
-
Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) Hazel Jane Plante
-
nîtisânak Jas M. Morgan
-
Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 Trish Salah
-
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars Kai Cheng Thom
