queer

A Flag To Remember
Stacy Jackson
2019, Poetry

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I want to be clear about my intentions with the way I am making the notes on poetry books.  I am not reviewing the books in a classical sense.  My intention is to write my thoughts about the work as I read it.  This is just my ideas and things i might alter or change, and maybe some critique of the work.  It is not intended to overly criticize the author or their work.  I wouldn’t spend time reading an entire book if I didn’t appreciate the work.  That said, I’m giving the books a score based on my own gut reaction to the work.  It’s just my opinion and should be taken with a grain of salt.

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23 September 2025, 7:42am

“A Flag To Remember”

I think it can be difficult to write poetry for a cause, even when that cause is important to the writer.  I have struggled with it in my own work, and have increasingly avoided topical or cause-oriented poetry.  In this case, because of the nature of the collection, or what I believe to be its nature, we need something to act as the gates we walk through into the author’s world.  I like this as the opening poem.  It’s a declaration, but I hope it’s also an indication of what to expect.  I think the poem could be tightened up just a bit, and there are some grammatical issues.  I’ve read a lot of self-published poetry, and these are pretty common across those poet’s work.  I think it’s a minor (and easily solved) issue.  I probably won’t mention it throughout, unless there is something egregious.  Good start.

“The Undecided”

Hmm…This is a brief poem, presumably about those whose gender is only defined as a part of cultural norms, but which would otherwise remain nebulous.  Maybe it is nebulous to those individuals still, even though there is pressure to put oneself into the boxes built by our societies.  My only critique of the writing would be that not every poem needs a rhyme.  I suspect now that there will be a heavy emphasis on rhyme, but that’s a talent few possess.  I certainly don’t.  I think if the author wants to be fully honest, she might try not forcing the poetry to rhyme.

“Penchant For Hoodies”

Storytelling.  I could see this whole situation, but it was told is only seven lines.  “Smuggled with goosebumps” is a great line.  It tells me a lot about the speaker.

Title suggestion: “Hoodies”

“An Ordinary Poem”

This little poem is so close to breaking free and becoming something.  I am usually okay with referencing a classic or clichéd poem, but I think maybe this could have started with just the classic lines and then the poem could start to become unraveled until we get to “We know people change / We know people change to.”  Those two lines in particular feel like the start of something else, like a cycle of repetitions interspersed with examples from the author’s life where people didn’t change.  That would start to sound like a chant of hope in a world that doesn’t deserve hope.  Promising, but ultimately flat.

“When you’re rejected by your mother and your father, you’re always looking for someone to replace that love.”

“The Butterfly who is Always Fearless”

I don’t have a lot to say about this.  There are some confusing lines, but it is either a poem to the author herself or to a sibling, so I fear that crucial context is missing and having work like this double checked by someone is good.  They can tell you where there might be some confusion.  I think it does a good job of making me want to know more about who this person is.  I wanted to explore some of those details.

Title suggestion: “Fearless Like A Butterfly”

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24 September 2025, 8:51am

“Glitter took over my lips as the pain escaped my soul.”

“Minimalist”

This is how the world should be.  In a perfect society, people would be free to their expression and there would be no cultural expectations on one’s gender.  And in that world, no one’s gender would even be questioned.  While nobody should feel obliged to announce their gender, in a more ideal world one’s gender wouldn’t even be announceable.  I have the benefit of living in a world where my own gender and sex are aligned and unquestioned, so maybe I have a lot to learn.

Title suggestion: “Less Is More, More Is Less”

“My biggest mistake was waiting for you to be ready, to meet me.”

“Breadcrumbing Revenge”

I’m not being dismissive, but this is some personal baggage.  I’m not sure if I quite grasp the final line: “You pity the men who taste the cold.”

Title suggestion: “The Junk Yard”

“Coterie Children”

I want the author to rewrite this about five more times.  The issue is that there is such good stuff in here, but I had so many hurdles to get to it.  The grammar and punctuation are jarringly erroneous.  I don’t think things need to be perfect to get across a point of view, or even that following traditional rules of English are necessary, but these errors in this one feel like mistakes.  I also think this could go further, more narrative, more internal dialogue from the speaker.  The picture that was painted was so familiar to my own school experience, and I like when a writer can put me in their own shoes.

Title suggestion: “Friends”

“Sorry, My Heart Is Home”

“The Hood Of This Woman”

This reads as a celebration of the embracing of one’s identity as a woman.  I can only assume that the author intended that, and I think it’s a lovely piece.  However, I almost wish this was written to God or the Universe or whoever the author thinks is responsible for all of this, like a celebration of the existence of women in general.  In the context of the collection, I think celebrating the concept of women would read as stronger, as other poems connect the author with the concept.  There are a lot of things in here to like.

Title suggestion: “The Making of a Woman”

“No Parent”

This is emotionally difficult for the writer.  “Passing connecting” is a difficult to read pair of words.  Normally, I would say that should be reworked, but it did make me think that writing parents who refuse to see you might make for an opportunity to go even further, to add more language that the brain and tongue struggle to get through.

“A Lover of Words”

Oh, oh…this!  This is my favorite so far, by a huge margin.  I adore this piece, maybe because it reminds me of how I write sex.  It’s so expressive.  I love it so much that I wish the title matched how strong it is.  Maybe it has some esoteric relationship with the lines, but I don’t know.  I am notorious for changing titles over and over because I never settle on them; I’m not one to criticize a title.  I personally would pad this out about 20% more, but it’s fantastic!  I really appreciate this following the poem about the terrible parents.  That feels effective, even if it isn’t intentional.

Title suggestion: “His Biography”

“The Only Pearl”

I want the author to rewrite this about five more times.  The issue is that there is such good stuff in here, but I had so many hurdles to get to it.  The grammar and punctuation are jarringly erroneous.  I don’t think things need to be perfect to get across a point of view, or even that following traditional rules of English are necessary, but these errors in this one feel like mistakes.  I also think this could go further, more narrative, more internal dialogue from the speaker.  The picture that was painted was so familiar to my own school experience, and I like when a writer can put me in their own shoes.

Title suggestion: “Consumed”

“The Infancy Stage”

I’m initially confused by the title, but the poem itself is important.  “I don’t see color” is the racist cry of people who don’t understand how racist they are.  Some of them think of themselves as allies, but their allyship is rooted in a White savior complex, the empathetic & compassionate arm of White Supremacy.  It becomes obvious when those people start saying things like “I don’t care if someone is Black or White or Purple or Polka-dotted….”  They have to include versions of people that they wouldn’t see as the same, outlandish.  It’s a form of dehumanization, but so deeply ingrained that they don’t always understand their own biases.  I love reading about the beauty of melanated skin, the way it glows, and the ownership of it.  I would like to read more about this, so maybe I can unpack it fully, but I have found it odd that part of American Black culture is to identify with kings & queens.  It’s not something I understand.  Not everything has to be for me!  But I’m interested in learning more.  I certainly accept those titles in queer culture, so I’m probably being ignorant about that.

Title suggestion: “Seeing Color”

“She is Queen”

I’m not sure what is going on.  She did this, he did this, you did this.  I’m disoriented because I am not sure who any of the people are throughout.  I feel bad saying that; I can tell this is a deeply personal piece, but I just don’t quite get it.

Title suggestion: “The Queen”

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25 September 2025, 9:55am

“The Tea, Is Time”

“They don’t drink tea, / but they boil the water.”  There are moments when Stacy Jackson surprises me.  I think those two lines are so good.  This poem is brief and it is fine overall.  I think it would be more effective if she had shown, rather than told.  There’s an opportunity to make the tension and heat rise throughout them piece, starting playfully as it does.  Give me some metaphors, some allusions, some deeper references.  

Title suggestion: “Boiling Water for Tea”

“Not To Be Uttered”

There are poems throughout, and I’ve probably noted this before, where the poems are so personal, but also so lacking in detail, that the reader couldn’t possibly glean meaning from them.  I remember when I was first writing all the time in college, many of the poems I wanted to write had to do with my own family.  But I would put them on paper, only to find that some things require a lot of backstory to be clear.  Even worse, I would find that as much as I loved these people (in my case), writing their stories was often boring.  Their lives weren’t boring; I was not yet skilled enough as a writer to tell those stories.  The poems in this book that deal with the people who I assume are the poet’s family, aren’t poorly conceived.  I can see where she is coming from in wanting to tell her story there, but I think they aren’t fleshed out enough.  To really delve in to those stories, rewriting and rewriting and rewriting might be required.  

Title suggestion: “Hide a Little”

“MUM”

I like the flow of this one, and the author is doing a better job of telling me who her family is.  I think it would benefit from repetition, maybe starting each line in the first and third stanza’s with “You remember when…”  That would make the second stanza stand out more, but also give a little more of a rhythm to the poem.  

“Existing Alone”

Simple, effective.  As I keep saying, it reminds me of the poems I was writing around 1998, when I was young and didn’t have much to look back on in my life.  I have a poem that is so similar to this one, the sort of coming of age declaration piece.  

“Sounds About White”

So good.  “can you repeat the question again?…  I was distracted with the community knowledge.”  I love that so much.  This poem is nicely crafted.  I would want the name of the film, unless it is meant to be that the writer couldn’t remember the title, in which case I would like that to be clearer.  Excellent stuff in here.

“Nipsey’s Hussle”

Sometimes we need to write down a little talk with ourselves.  In the overall context of this collection, I think that works well, and she does it throughout.  I liked the little asides.  They don’t seem to be narratively sequenced.  It might have been nice if the author wrote a timeline to adhere to for both the family stories and for the poems to herself.  Not one timeline for both, but two separate time lines going on to hop back and forth between, and then to have the sort of trans-affirming pieces mixed in.  

Title suggestion: “And Then Open Your Eyes Again”

“Island It’s Free”

One of my favorite books of all time is Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, the poetic novella she wrote that would eventually be adapted into a full novel.  Shange writes the entire poem in the way the characters would speak, inserting their dialects by way of altering the spellings of words.  It’s so beautiful, and this poem is doing a lot of the same thing.  She has that same ability to convey how a person sounds through the spelling choices.  I’d love to see more of it!

Title suggestion: “Di Way Him Looks At Yuh”

“Proper, Is Its Truest Form”

Love. The picture is so clear to me.  I’m not sure the title fits the poem, but otherwise it is great.

Title suggestion: “Proper”

“Love begs for forgiveness”  

Title suggestion: “Thy Kingdom Come”

“Never been kissed, Again”

I’m thinking that Stacy Jackson needed a second book, one about herself and her own life.  I think she sees her own experiences as wholly related to her trans identity, and is some ways her story is very important to include in the story of trans people in America today.  It’s not an uncommon story, but her individual story has taken over, which then takes away a little from the subtitle of the book Trans Experience Poetry, Intersex Identity & Inspirational Quotes.  In her defense, the author didn’t promise broad trans experience.  But it did feel like that was implied.  Maybe having the book appear to be more personal would help ground it in a story about herself and being trans, rather than how it is currently packaged as a collection of poems about the broader trans community.  I don’t know; I don’t want to be too critical of the choices, but I do think there were two books here, A Flag To Remember, an anthology of trans poetry.  It’s a lot of work, but getting other authors involved and having the author be the editor would have been interesting, and separately a poem of personal situations that further the poet’s own story.  

Title suggestion: “One Pinch Away From Too Much Sugar”

“Open Letter”

I like this.  I’m not sure, but if it were me (and it’s not!), I would try out reworking the lines as prose.  Not rewriting, just reformatting.  I don’t know which would work better, and maybe the author did play around with it and arrived at this being in its current format.

Even though I think this is a strong poem, I think a lot of these things are things we’ve heard before.  The unconvinced don’t hear them anymore, not only because they don’t want to, but because it’s always the same list of things, and I wonder if the author could include some things we haven’t thought about.  I can’t say what those things are, but small details.  Small inconveniences about being trans in a world not oriented toward that.  I might like to have a mix of small and big issues.

I am very much hoping that there is a follow up with a list of reasons the author would choose to be trans.  Maybe she’s not there yet; society certainly isn’t, but I hope she does feel that sometimes.  It’d be nice to see it in this book, but based on how things have been written, I doubt it.  She seems very much stuck in the negativity of it all, and it’s no wonder she is.  This was in 2019, and the world was only just becoming increasingly hostile to the trans community.  In 2025, I couldn’t imagine looking for silver linings.  I just hope for a world where that can be the case.

“When people bring up the past, tell them Jesus dropped the charges.”

“The Baby’s Day Out”

“Time, when there’s No Clocks”

“You wonder how your family looks now” is such a sad line.  I like how she painted a picture of a small moment when her thoughts, her sadness, was interrupted by an absurdity.  It read like that moment, and I appreciate that the author doesn’t go back to the thoughts.  You wouldn’t, would you?  That little interaction with the other shopper hitting you with a cart would snap you back into the present and you wouldn’t just return as you had been.

Title suggestion: “Clocked!”

“The Check Is Blank”

This has a lot of potential that isn’t quite realized.  I want more, deeper…not too much, but just a little bit further.

“Cupid Shoots To Kill”

Fantastic!  I really love the way this is written and the storytelling.

“Kitty Litter”

Put away the thesaurus.  It’s not always helpful, and this is the first time I’m being asked by the poet to work for understanding.  Some poets like to do that to the reader, like TS Eliot.  But Stay Jackson doesn’t write that way, so it seems like a lot to include two esoteric words here.  I have done it too, but I try to use them for effect, and I’m not sure there was an attempt at an effect here.  

I’m also unclear as to who this woman in the poem is.  Why do were care about her, or do we?  I think there are some nuggets in here of interesting phrasing, but I’m not sure I get what is going on.

“Made Up People”

This feels like something I would have placed as the first piece in the book.  I like what is being said, and I also appreciate the sadness of “Am I real mother?” going unanswered. 

“Secret White Emails”

This is such a specific experience, and I love this poem for that.  Stay Jackson keeps touching on these trans-specific issues in a really good way.  I just wish that these poems were separate from what feels like her life story in ways that aren’t exclusively about being trans.  It’s complicated.  I like this one though. 

“Forgot, He left”

“Gripping Onto It Firmly”

Beautiful phrasing.  I’ve written pieces like this and I love them written by others.  It’s the internal that seems like so much more than the situation.  It’s heartbreaking, and could be more heartbreaking.  Lean in.  But ultimately, very nice. 

Title suggestion: “No Man”

“Your Grandmother’s Folklore”

I absolutely adore this.  I like the realness in the dialogue.  I’ve been confused or critical of the titles throughout this book, and this one seems like it makes sense, but ultimately I think it needs updated.  I might have titled it “Fairies” or “The Rainbow” or something like that…maybe even just “Folklore.”  Because the grandmother isn’t part of the scene, I’d leave her out of the title. But it’s a fantastic moment.

Title suggestion: “The Rainbow Fairy”

“DNA, Is What He Calls It”

It’s hard to embarrass me with a poem, but this is a little steamy.  Because the poet is going for structure, I want more attention to that structure.   

Title suggestion: “Sting Me”

“Pit Bulls”

Great storytelling; needs a slight amount of editing.   

“Your Brother’s Wedding”

It’s just hit after hit at this point!  I really love this, even thought it is devastating. “You may have not the body you want but you have the brain that you need.”    I’d rework that line slightly, but it’s a great part of this moment.

“The Neighbor’s Husband”

This poem is brutal in its honesty, and I hope not to the poet’s detriment.  It’s real life, it’s gritty, it’s both beautiful and ugly at the same time.   

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26 September 2025, 6:25am

Final Thoughts

A Flag to Remember was not the book I thought I wanted, but it was an honest and open collection of the author’s life stories.  Stacy Jackson is young; her poems definitely read as a writer who lacks some of the experience that will come with age.  That isn’t a comment on her capacity to grow and flower into an amazing poet.  There are so many bits throughout where I can see that spark, the flashes of brilliance that if nourished will take her to great heights.  I wasn’t able to find anything about her.  She doesn’t seem to have a social media presence.  This book is nearly 6 years old now, and I’d like to find out if she is still writing and how her writing have evolved.

My primary issue with the book is that while I love what Stacy Jackson wanted to do, the concept falls apart pretty quickly.  It’s more a personal narrative that isn’t often about her trans-ness, and that’s still an interesting story.  I was just missing what the subtitle suggested: Trans Experience Poetry, Intersex Identity & Inspirational Quotes.  

On the quotes, these are not quotes.  One cannot quote oneself.  These are micro poems or thoughts.  If it were me, I would restructure them all into micros and lose a few that are a little clichéd.  There are a lot of inspirational quotes by queer & trans folks that would work in the book.  Use those as well.

I think there’s more to this story.  I think the author would benefit from critique, proofreading, editing, all that.  That’s something I know I didn’t know I needed when I was first starting to write.  My college creative writing classes were probably the most valuable classes I ever took.  The opened me up to criticism, and allowed me to remove myself from my work once I was done, to allow others to read it from their perspectives, and to give me honest feedback about that.  It’s so important to know if your message is being conveyed, otherwise what is the poem for? 

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Started Reading: 23 SEP 2025
Finished Reading: 25 SEP 2025

A Flag To Remember
Stacy Jackson
2019, Poetry
Self Published
18 November 2019
English
ISBN #978-1078744881