"Impersonation was originally conceived as the first book of a triptych charting gender transition; however, the second and third books in the sequence, Transmigration and Coming to Life, were published first, and this collection kept growing. Impersonation now bookends the sequence, collecting poems written before and after the stages of transition marked by Transmigration and Coming to Life."--From the Author's Note

Transmigration explores many kinds of journeys in, through and after death: the journey of a self from one gender to the next; the journey of the soul in and out of flesh; the journey of a marriage into and out of love; the journey of a body from amputation to wholeness. Boiling human existence down to love, wish and desperation, Joy (formerly Jay) Ladin cobbles many materials— shreds of Cosmo Girl, metaphysics and how-to text, intimate moments and moments of despair—into a halting, sometimes faltering path from a life that is unlivable to life that is fully lived.

Ladin continues the journey of self from one gender to the next--a journey of the soul in and out of flesh

"The book of Anna is written in the voice of Anna Asher, a fictional Czech-German Jew who spent her adolescence in a concentration camp and now lives in 1950s Prague answering phones for the secret police. This genre-defying book of prose diary entries and autobiographical poems offers intimate glimpses of Anna's present--her writing process, relationships with neighbors, obsessive sexual behavior, chain-smoking, and idiosyncratic exploration of Jewish tradition--while the poems recount her unsparing efforts to reckon with horror, survival, and their aftermath. Written in the midst of Joy Ladin's gender transition, this book asks provocative questions about the meaning of trauma, gender, suffering and empathy that speak to our current historical moment in haunting and indelible ways"--

"Joy Ladin sends spies into the Promised Land."