Seahorse

Now, especially now, it’s vital that we remember the pasts that shape our presents, even as they (thankfully) do not define them. In Seahorse, Natasha Dennerstein does just this: mines the past—of trans representation, of feminist thought, her own—in order to give depth to the present, how it is possible that “there is an ‘I’” at all. At turns “bitter and twisted,” “cunning,” “warm / and effervescent,” Dennerstein’s collection testifies to the work—the bloody, relentless, sexy, public-private work—behind the statement “I survive.”
– Cam Awkward-Rich

Natasha Dennerstein pops her poetry with culture, estrogen and brilliantly bold honesty. Reading this book brought me closer to myself, my sisters, and our shared histories. Trans is beautiful and Natasha illustrates how that beauty comes from hard won victories over self and others. Seahorse is a well-cast spell. I’m so grateful for these words.
– Mx Justin Vivian Bond

How lucky we are to be swimming in the same ocean as Natasha Dennerstein’s Seahorse. Tender and fierce, funny and wrenching, direct and sly, these poems are captivating. From sex worker to nurse to poet, Dennerstein shows us how one transwoman has lived in order to bring us all back to life.
– TC Tolbert

Natasha Dennerstein’s Seahorse escorts you as you “limp your way” to the street and to the hospital room, collecting “twenty dollar bills,” “gauze and sequins,” “cabbies and truckers” in “the afternoon Coors sunlight” toward the discovery that after all the “blood-stained ribbon,” after all the fear “of being clocked,” you, too, can “do it/sooner, do it quicker, do it sooner,” you can, like the narrator, be a “spy in the house of love”, “survive/on sandwiches, apples, coffee, Marlboro Lights,/the kindness of queers” and arrive to where “Now there is an ‘I.’”
— Matthew Clark Davison