Bridget Gordon

Short Bio

Bridget Gordon (she/her, fae/faer) is a queer trans woman and emerging poet based in Chicago. A former MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she tried faer hand at sports journalism before settling into short-form writing about queer longing, identity, and liminality. Fae has been published in Moist Poetry Journal and TRANS MAG. Fae lives with her husband, metamour, cats, and a growing TBR pile.

Artist’s Statement

I’m an emerging queer poet and performer looking to explore and grasp the peculiar contours of life as a trans person; which is to say, as someone who makes their home in the marginalia, the liminal, the crepuscular. I’m interested in transness not as a way of existing but as a mode of relating; how our connections with others, and with ourselves, develop along more complex and even inscrutable lines than they might have otherwise. Transness not only as a way of being in the world but as a way of being with other people.

Much of my work lives in orbit around t4t relationships— as sexual and romantic partners, as friends and chosen family, as artistic collaborators and accomplices. Yearning and longing are common themes— as expressed through a decisively sapphic lens— but are telescoped beyond physical and sexual intimacy. Transness has a way of making us yearn for friends, for tight-knit communities of care, for different timbres of voice. When I write about connections with other trans people, I’m looking not just at the shape of that connection, but how and where and why it is expressed to others. 

Where these connections encounter and problematize the borders of more broadly-accepted— and, increasingly, state-enforced— modes of living and relating, I want to focus less on the violence resulting from the conflict and more on the inherent promise of freedom from that violence contained within these connections.

As trans people, we learn how to accept and then map this complexity of relating with others. The first person we learn to do that with is ourselves. Transitioning necessarily places the Self in an eternal liminal space, where who we are before transition and who we are after are set apart, even as the lines that set us apart are drawn in brackish waters. I find myself less interested in the particulars of transition as such and more in transition as a way of both escalating and resolving internal conflicts within the Self. Transness offers a way of living with and understanding the Self as a multiplicity, a body in motion, a cosmopolitan city-state.

Ultimately I want my work to emphasize the trans body, the trans heart, the trans life as appropriate subjects of high art and poetics. A billet-doux for our past selves. A palimpsest of desire.

Art cannot, and will not, exist in a vacuum; we seek out the numinous not for its own sake, but so that we can tell others what we found. I am eager for the opportunity to be in community with— to relate with— other artists as we interrogate the borders of living and loving and art-making. In poetry, we set out to notice something beautiful and tell about it; often, what we find that’s so beautiful is each other. 

All of this to say:

I believe in Truth and Beauty, inseparably. That none of us are Free until all of us are. And that Love will save us all.