If we trace the impressions of time on the material, fit, and form of a garment like a dress, what stories of veiling and yearning do our fingers reveal? If we trace the weave of history on & into the body, what secrets surface—and how to bear so much? Safa Khatib's A Dress of Locusts stops us to answer.
      As a trans storyteller, my en-genre-ed mind clocks narrative onto the associational body of A Dress of Locusts. The collection feels welcome to the read, from the reliance on a first-person storyteller, voicing their desire, horror, and suspense, like a series of surreal tales, to the formal choice of being divided into five parts—an in medias res intro, three delves through history and heartspace, and an unapologetic ending. The narrative thread, however, refuses resolution. "Life in My Country" opens the book with a keystone image: "I" across a threshold "kissing a dark rock" danced around by a woman in white. The worshiper of the stone and her "Sister. Sibling. Stranger. Splendor." chanting in circles situate a duality that Khatib attempts to reconcile throughout the book with the excruciating beauty and excruciating grief that characterizes her work.
      Each of A Dress of Locusts' three interior movements attempts sense-making the conditions of her body-world as a trans, first-generation South Indian writer in the U.S. Persistent discomfort necessitates movement, the search for peace that maybe can't exist while she must. The unflinching debut expands the field of the [loose lineage of trans poetics] by expanding time. Through and beyond the nightmare of white settler colonialism, Khatib's transition narrative is an accounting of centuries, from the ruins of temples from the time of Gilgamesh to "bad porn on the TV above the bar," a search for form and the means to carry the weight of all the broken records of history. Wandering past lives and fugue states, not in loss of identity but in accumulation, Khatib's approach to the question "What will come of it?" gifts generous insight into the will and price to persist.
      The first interior movement describes "the ancient story of demise," a state of confusion like freedom, possible only when vacant and various as the rooms of a hotel. The speaker is made and remade by inhabitation, at the fogged window—once in a jacquard suit, next in a satin dress. Not gender fluid, the subject of change, so much as the object, she is receptive, a mannequin of manner and mood. Poems "The Distances" and "The Executioner" first define the act of penetration that reoccurs throughout the book as What's inside you is you. They suggest that to love the executioner's touch is to be inseparable from the executioner—his pleasures, his violences, his fears. Figuring physical and imaginative receptivity of an other as becoming troubles self-knowledge and phenomenology as a compass of the trans gender journey. If the discomfort and joy that guide transition are shaped by an other's will, present and past, some of whom wish us dead, then what point of reference can we trust or call a "true" self?
      The second interior movement excavates the futility of pleasure. Doubly, Khatib destabilizes the trans empowerment trope of self-directed bodily autonomy.

But you began to feel that what brought you here
was no more remarkable

than what brought you, other times,
to cry in front of mirrors . . .

than what told you you were unable to touch
the origin

of yourself, and yet in love
with quarreling

with what you learned: each line, color, angle

of the face, the body
meant

you looked at what you could.

Khatib is rightfully skeptical. If the power of human imagination is seemingly limitless, what explains the persistence of harm? Even in the position of subjecthood, whatever the speaker experiences as bliss sours into pain: "I made my body / do what I wanted—or I obeyed its demands. Dream was / the engine of intellect. You text: 'Baby, you have a mind / to hurt me, don't you?'" As agency and desire rise close to the body, the speaker grips a double-edged sword. When we are told "From each conqueror you learned / that to remake the world // you must first invent its past," the line's emphasis reminds that destruction is requisite in revision—not unlike the common trans tragedy of a parent not celebrating a coming out, but mourning the loss of their child, gender transition a death sentence to their conception of the kid, the past, the known.
      A Dress of Locusts braves ruins littered with limbs of sculpture and flesh, and Biblical times toward the invention of myth, sifting layers of time, as if for an origin of human conflict itself. From "Beside the fallen minarets, beneath which / rest the remains of the shrine / to Dionysus" to "Gilgamesh on a street corner in Baghdad" where the miracle of human-animal metamorphosis bestows the inability to swim and loss of voice, the speaker's digging finds only "the forgotten dead" and "cruelties and paradoxes of the past." Tracing her converging socio-political lineages on such long timelines, Khatib weaves a story of humankind—ruins all the way down. These observations form a "logic of ruins," and at minimum insist that so far as the past informs the present, now is inescapable.

But after, I would wait for all to leave but the one
who led the prayer, the one in whom I thought I saw
what you deny me, as if sex were where the distinctions
I'd for so long been taught—between reason
and ecstasy, duty and joy—might, as I reached
back for him, lose their power . . . That's how
naïve I was. Nothing really changed.

     Search this bleak horizon for a glint that being changed changes the world, hope for intelligence that can reconceive the course of history—privileges and naivete tower the view, threaten to crush you. Yet throughout movement three, Khatib's seeking continues. Haunted by Ishtar—Mesopotamian goddess of war and sexual love—the speaker is bequeathed a dress of locusts that associationally manifests "anecdota / Tawarīkh / records of the days, the days— / my soul: / a shutter / which opens / and opens . . ." Both gift and curse, the speaker learns to bear the record. What once appeared as divided states—pleasure and pain, past and present, male and female, oppressor and oppressed—are recast as interwoven, the long grim trail not shadow but twin.

Rapture. Terror. But the plain
truth is that his touch first meant
my power, then his, then mine again,
then, soon enough, if not kindness,
the illusion of kindness,
illusion that, for some time, had been enough.

     A Dress of Locusts is a reckoning of clashing dualities and deeply personal legacies. Each of the book's three interior movements end in the poetic series "Dear Safa." These direct addresses of the poet to herself are remonstrative: "[...] macron, biden, netanyahu, sunak, scholz / may appear / like friends / in your cosmopolitan dream / in bloodied suits / singing to the night air: the solution / of the death camp [...]"—but "What will come of it?" she asks, as if complicit as a recipient of any comfort under the exploits of global capitalism and war of worldviews waged by the U.S. throughout the non-Western world. Section two fucks around through history to find a way out from under the burden of discomfort—an impossible task. At last, she calls us to rest and recall the changeable faces of desire, "Fashioner, Conqueror, Nourisher, Judge," before she and we the readers can carry on into section three, where the speaker herself stands as the site of destruction:

The violence you know
is not the act of the stranger—

It is your sustenance: this continent
which remains

the American night, the ancestral crime—

See that your face
is so like her alabaster face:

record of a past, altered beyond recognition.

     The book's outro returns to the present and the conditions of daily life while draped in lessons from her epic sociohistorical dive. "Absence is the Guide" characterizes the initial attempt to reconcile the problem of duality as a former distraction from another state of being, "where I've made my one life    bound to this vessel." Hauntingly, pain has vacated these later poems. Instead, mysteries glimmer behind every drip or glass of water, "hawks in the half-light, the hunt," yet hidden, out of view. Their distance and the speaker's stillness—because trauma? dissociation? stoicism?—keeps epiphany at bay, but also any dishonest, comfortable interpretation of triumph over turmoil. The abundance of water and animal imagery points to something akin to Nature's indifference to human affairs—maybe the Universe's? In the final poem, "One Shore, Then Another," we are left with a story of horses on an island in the Carolinas, wild for centuries, a tale of bewilderment that could end in wonder. Swiftly, we are told, "[...] that isn't their story [...] They do not weep for us..."
      But, A Dress of Locusts does.
      The collection's title carries the swarm—of devastation, many-voiced and exquisitely rendered over time. In Khatib's cautionary tale, tragedy defines humanity. Yet, at the margins of each surreal vignette, I hear simple questions: How to live as a (trans) woman? How to be a daughter, a loving partner? Her urgent book suggests that rising to action isn't the answer. At the juncture of past, present, and future, Khatib challenges us to don our relentless histories and pause if not to grieve. If every "new century" will cease to be an oxymoron, before the mind marches on, A Dress of Locusts stresses the necessity of asking how on Earth not to wreak more hell. From such resolute stillness, I wait for what she'll say next.