I’ll Carry It with Me

Amanda Hawkins explores Michael M. Weinstein’s new poetry collection “Saint Consequence.”

By Amanda HawkinsAugust 17, 2025

• Poetry

• Gender & Sexuality

HISTORICALLY, WHEN I begin reading a book of poetry, I try to forget I have a body. I try to enter the text curious and pointed, focused and leaving the self behind. That is how I begin Michael M. Weinstein’s new collection Saint Consequence.

But this time, the leaving doesn’t work. Trans bodies (like Weinstein’s, like my own) are becoming increasingly less safe in the United States. The result is, personally, a hyperawareness of the body at any time, but especially as I read Weinstein’s poems. I have a concussion, so at first I cannot work at my usual intellectual clip. Weinstein’s book is for me, then, a series of corporeal impressions, hearkening back to Rimbaud’s “derangement of the senses.” In a book of glorious, sprawling, sometimes disorienting lyricism, what is recognizable?

Even through the concussive fog of my first reading, Saint Consequence leans toward the sonic and semantic possibilities of language, including signposts of personal narrative: a trans body, a crip life, a particular mind moving through the world. The collection includes a series of pastorals alongside a heroic crown, rhyme and near-rhyme, lineation that roves over the field of the page as well as more traditional, left-justified couplet forms. Structurally, the book reads like memoir, poems collected into sections arcing from temporal and physical distances to question and present place (“Then,” “There,” “Where,” and “Here”). Those sections are titled in the body of the work but not in the table of contents, an omission I love for its experiential in-the-moment discovery as one reads or flips through.

The most tethering images in the collection appear in “Cloister,” a poem toward the end of the book, and offer me access back through the collection with the poem’s near-narrative mention of a “smear of / mayonnaise, cold cuts bit into, / crumbs on a napkin, names.” Meanwhile, the most tethering affect that cuts through the fog is connection, a lover, an embodied museum date: “Our bodies are about other people,” the poem begins. A few lines later, the lover suckles, “not gentle,” at the speaker’s “post-surgical nevermind.” The speaker seems to be saying that what is important here is not only the past, what was once underneath this suckling, but also how this lover makes the present body especially real through touch, through an eyelock that also says “Here you are.” In this poem, I hear: This is what it’s like being in the world in love and in a body that has shifted in more than one way. (A body that must use a cane, a body that has medically transitioned.)

In the earlier poem “Crip Album,” Weinstein includes a note on the word “crip,” a historically derogatory term reclaimed by persons in the disabled community, including the poet himself. Reclaiming language in these poems also means reclaiming the body in all its pasts and presents. What’s more, in these capacious poems, one version of the body can interact with another. In “Cloister,” the speaker is wounded like the unicorn supposedly sleeping in a tapestry, whose “caption reads / The Unicorn at Rest, but he’s / bleeding. Look, his white neck / the repetitive flowers against. / Pain’s its own kind of weather: meaningless / depth in a world made for flatness.” The speaker is “literally touched.” Connection seems to make physicality—and all its realities—more possible.

Spanning years and continents, Weinstein’s poems are wildly honest but also hopeful. The language is insistent on convolution—on overlap and double-back, often in the form of sound. For example, in “Trans People of the Past” the speaker repeats words a few times over, hearkens back: “[Y]ou have existed / before. Did you make yourself think it / over and over? When / one person unbuttoned your shirt in a wavery / act of belief, were there words / for the body you were?” (Emphasis mine to highlight rhyme and repetition.) In so many poems, Weinstein does not just rhyme and near-rhyme once, but instead lands a sound and keeps returning. This is the trans and crip body in space. This is discovery and rediscovery (read: kinds of coming out) over and over again. Sounds in poems are clustered and close, a constant near-reminder of what has come before. The relentlessness of those sounds rivals Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sprung rhythm, and they surprise in a time when poets seem particularly rhyme-shy.

The voice in Weinstein’s poems that tend toward sound and re-sound creates a dense forest of aural experience that verges on both excess pleasure and self-conscious distress. In “An Act,” a poem about transparency’s risk (especially in intimate relationships), I mark so many echoes on the page that it looks like a child’s abstract art. All the sonic callbacks seem to remind us that the past, the past, the past keeps surfacing. In Saint Consequence, there is an inescapable and ever-present risk of divulging: “[I]f ever a lavish / fact comes untucked, it must be latched / in the black of a past I can’t / unpack, an ache in the each I reach / for endlessly.” Details of the past must be kept under wraps, but facts come “untucked,” and the resonance of that reality is a past the speaker might not be able to “unpack,” a constant “ache,” a constant “reach.” The suggestions of diction, like the repetitions of sound, communicate that the present is both undeniable and inescapable.

Every layer of Weinstein’s poetics thwarts my initial impulse to leave myself out. In fact, his poems insist on including the reader. In the pages-long poem “Street of the Friendship of Nations,” the often-addressed “you” is not generic in the least, but something about the point of view suggests wide inclusion. In section VI, the speaker gets even more direct: “You get to be in the picture,” it says, as if addressing the reader themself, “and you get to / stay there.”

Weinstein doesn’t mention love, but that is what the body here conjures across various landscapes that meld into each other. From the Negev desert in Israel to Saint Petersburg, Russia, to the Shandong province of China, the speaker moves—and could be—in so many places, and that’s the point. Weinstein’s poems explore what it means, and whether it is even possible, to love the body in space. Any space, any landscape. In a long, sprawling poem, “The Center,” the speaker moves through an unnamed place that truly could be anywhere in the “second world” (as Weinstein says in a note), and he concedes: “No way to summon / the crunch of astroturf beneath your cleats back”; “No way to crop your blotchpink finger”; “No / way to be absent except absolutely. / & that, more than anything else, would be / poverty: / not to live / in a physical world.” The physical world is inescapable, the body not something one can edit out of the frame of selfhood or landscape. We experience the world in a body. The landscape includes us.

Saint Consequence rings with internality, here and elsewhere—the self reflects, realizes, and relents: “I’ll carry / it with me then,” the speaker says, referring to the body. It’s the voice realizing there is no other choice but to do the weird work of wholeness—past and present both: “a body / now rebuilding itself as a shaky democracy,” where sometimes that internality is a physical roll call. As the speaker explains, “Tactical maintenance of an interior / hence becomes essential—here are my tendons, here my separate lungs.” Instead of editing out the body or the body’s past, the speaker—and by extension all of us—carries the body and all its histories with him. The body and its former iterations remain an ever with, an ever presence, as heavy and complex at times as some of the lines in this multifarious collection, even with the “toppled dictatorship” and “its unreliable / utilities & walls graffitied with words of the old regime.”

The fact of a trans body—a body shifted externally to exist more in line with one’s inner self—permeates Saint Consequence, but even more crucial is the way this desired shift dovetails with another shift that is undesired and unchosen. These poems document the experience of streamlining the inner and outer selves only to have the outer self shift in a new way that challenges both one’s sense of stability and one’s experience of ability. This inclusive, capacious catalog of selfhood exudes love. But what does love look like in a “toppled / dictatorship of a body”? It looks like carrying the past into the present (“I’ll carry / it with me then”), sound into sound, sound into self. Love, if anything, is a recognition and acceptance of what exists, and the opposite of erasure and eradication is the acknowledgment of simultaneity and multiplicity. The past exists—past selves, former travels, many versions of a familiar place.

Perhaps that’s why when I reflect on this book later, I don’t think of the couplets, tercets, or obedient forms hugging the left margin like good little children. I don’t even think of the sonnets—and there are many. These regular forms, and their many unconventional versions, are important tethers for the reader, but it is the poems that sprawl across the page that keep my attention well beyond the page. They rove and refuse any imposed order, instead giving in to the density of information and impression, making sweeping connections across image and syllable. Maybe their power lies not in choosing one form or another, but in the slip of the poetic mask, following feeling, loosening the very idea of form. In the space they take up, these poems offer a glimpse into the speaker’s deepest vulnerabilities. This debut reads like the hand of the past reaching into the present, ushering us forward like the lover pushing aside the crutch: “Here you are” says Saint Consequence. “(Says art.)”