Dances of Time and Tenderness

The chain Carter brings us into consists of intimacies, associations, and repetitions—the stuff that makes up history. . . a gorgeous invocation of queer community across genders, orientations, and time.

Smartly and elegantly, Carter’s essay-poems begin in one place and end up in another, much like the notions of self and gender the book so playfully explores. . . smart, provocative, and entertaining.

Pirouetting between the past and present, fiction and memoir, and poetry and academic theory, Julian Carter’s Dances of Time and Tenderness conjures a text rippling with queer potentiality. . . Roving in topic, Dances is animated by the politics that puts trans bodies—and their ability to change the world—at the forefront.

[A] transpoetic story cycle linking  art, death, and kinky sex, through which he partners readers in intimate encounters with trans/queer histories from Neolithic burials to coffee in present-day San Francisco.