Transits of Voice: Lyric Subjectivity and Utterance in Zaina Alsous’s A Theory of Birds

Abstract

Zaina Alsous’s 2019 collection of poems A Theory of Birds deploys a politic of voice that applies situated practices to the lyric form to disrupt the form’s (dis)possessive logics. Through speakerly mediations of the sublime and its transits of voice, refusals to translate or represent in full, and repeated assertions of agentive presence, Alsous constructs in her title poem, “A Theory of Birds”, a lyric subjectivity that both troubles and is troubled by the objects of their lyric musing. Alsous uses the lyric mode, and its tactics of ‘understanding’ through observation and feeling, to un-settle both the gaze of a desiring, speaking subject and the very structure of knowing by which the lyrically beautiful—the sublime, its departures and transits—asserts power over and through such subjects. Drawing from Jodi Byrd’s and Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s theories of subjectivities, I observe how lyric transitivities become a critical site for Alsous’s poetic interventions. Applying Asef Bayat’s and Sarah Ihmoud’s notions of the “power of presence” to Alsous’s lyric, I consider how a politic of voice intervenes in the transitive modes of dominance that structure Alsous’s speaking subject. I then ask, what possibilities, contingencies, and futurities are produced when the lyric voice transits and translates others’ voices in ways that uphold the incommensurate and incomprehensible experiences that create the gulf between the lyric subject and the object of their musings? How might poets attend to the transformations they produce through a lyric speaking subject’s representations and translations of voice in order to refuse to reproduce the logics of dominance within the lyric mode?