Wesley Lewis

Mariana Spada’s poetry collection The Law of Conservation is out this month from Deep Vellum in Robin Myers’s translation. In this poem, Spada echoes the questions and comments she receives about her trans identity from the people around her. When did you know what you were? What did you feel the first time you glanced at yourself in the mirror and knew? Have you always known?

Is it “femicide” or “feminicide”? I’ve been asked when referring, in English, to the murder of my younger sister, Liliana Rivera Garza, at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, Angel González Ramos, which occurred in Mexico City on July 16, 1990, and which I explore in Liliana´s Invincible Summer (Hogarth Press, 2023).

I was born at the very end of the 1960s in a poor, unattractive little settlement on the northwestern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. This settlement was a production brigade in the Peyzawat Land Reclamation Sector, which belonged to the third division of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. The production brigades in the sector were situated several kilometers from one another; traveling between bri­gades meant a trip down dirt roads through the desert.