Overview

A debut essay collection that upends our notions of loneliness, wilderness, and liberation Transanything reveals a world in metamorphosis. A hermit crab retires its shell, lovers drift apart, and seasons churn, all amid Ever Jones’s own narrative of midlife gender transition.   Jones takes up a tradition of writing—about the American landscape, solitude, wilderness, and the West—long intertwined with colonialism and heteropatriarchy, and makes it wholly their own. A self-proclaimed “nature essay” misbehaves, wandering away from the hummingbird outside Jones’s window. In their chronicle of a week in Yellowstone, Jones navigates trails frequented by grizzlies and a campground where their identity is regarded as equally dangerous. Elk, bison, and bark spiders roam this book’s pages, but it is the gray wolf—the embattled apex predator of the American West, narrow survivor of settler colonial violence, and vessel for American myths of independence—who emerges as Jones’s shapeshifting coprotagonist.   Taking on a global web of colonial systems that seek to divide us, Jones disrupts loneliness and forges space for queerness and transness to be aliveness—to be transanything.

Full Product Details

Author:   Ever Jones
Publisher:   Northwestern University Press
Imprint:   Northwestern University Press
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9780810148703

ISBN 10:   0810148706
Pages:   128
Publication Date:   15 August 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Preface                                                                                    Transanything                                                             Unraveling I                                                                                        In the Stance of Someone Just Departing                   Lonely Species                                                           Paperclip: A Story of Invasive Species                                              Unraveling II                                                              Snap the Whip                                                                                    Unraveling III                                                             Paper Cranes                                                               Unraveling IV                                                             On Senses: A Nature Essay                                                                Restoration of Wolves                                                                        Unraveling V                                                              Grammar of Gender                                                                            The Uninvited                                                             Unraveling VI                                                             Origin of Love                                                                        Dragon                                                                                                            Wolf Tone                                                                   Unraveling VIII                                                          She Used to be Mine: An Afterword                          Acknowledgments                                                      References

Reviews

""Transanything uses collage, fragment, nonce, and hermit crab forms to invoke an 'unbetweeness' that serves to undermine anything resembling a central, institutional authority. The aliveness of this book has an ethic, a power, inspired by love. As a queer reader, I am filled with relief, with gratitude, with a sense of my own presence, and release."" --Miah Jeffra, author of American Gospel

Author Information

Ever Jones is a professor of creative writing at the University of Washington Tacoma. Their poetry books includenightsong and Wilderness Lessons.

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