Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay

This lyric essay explores transmasculinity and the oceanic world through themes of water, fish, and mythology. Author Lars Horn interweaves short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities with longer essays, creating a unified book with a sinuous, wave-like form.

Horn explores various subjects, including marine history, theology, body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. From their upbringing as a model in photos and art installations to their travels before coming out as trans, these essays interrogate liminal physicalities. Horn reexamines the uniformity of bodily experience, challenging the singularity of “the body” as a cultural and scientific object. The essays privilege ways of seeing and being that resist binaries, falter, fracture, and mutate. This book blends the aquatic, mystical, and physical, reaching a transcendent place beyond them.

(This book may contain a sharpie mark on the top or bottom edge and may show mild signs of shelfwear.)