By the People, For the People: Trans Poetics and DIY Culture, Part 1: ‘Jagged Edges and Rough Words’
Rae White
Acknowledgement: This piece was written on stolen lands in Magandjin, the lands of the Jagera and Turrbal people. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land.
I’m at one of my fave poetry open mics, Echoes from the Cave Inn, waiting for my name to be called. The crowded room is full of fellow queer, trans, and gender diverse people eating freshly made pizza, sipping beers, and hugging mates they haven’t seen since last month’s open mic.
I get up on stage wearing my jorts, and bright pink and orange tie-dye shirt that says ‘homosexual tendencies.’ I read a poem from the zine in my hand, freshly photocopied earlier that morning. The stage lights are bright, and I squint to read the collaged text on the page. After my reading, I roam through the crowd handing out copies of the zine to friends, loved ones, and strangers. Some people tuck them carefully into tote bags. One person immediately opens theirs and says, ‘I should make a zine!’ This is one of my favourite things in the world: a poem existing simultaneously in the air around me and in someone’s hands.
Open mics and zines are ephemeral. A spoken word performance disappears the second it ends, surviving only in memory and grainy phone videos. Zines are often made in tiny batches, stapled together on living room floors, traded at zine fairs, handed to friends, or secreted into local street libraries. They resist permanence both accidentally and politically, and I think this is part of why so many trans and gender diverse people gravitate towards them. Many of my fellow zinesters and poets have continued to protest against the Queensland government’s restrictions on gender affirming care in the public system for young people since their implementation back in January 2025, and also took part in creating the world’s largest trans flag, which was coordinated by Trans Justice Project and unveiled on 31 March 2026 in Meanjin to mark Transgender Day Of Visibility.
I say all this as someone who exists between two worlds, in more than one sense: I am a gender-messy non-binary person; I make zines, but I’ve also had three books traditionally published. I love the stability and reach of traditional publishing. I enjoy knowing my books can end up in libraries (shelved within the Dewey Decimal System, not tucked between pages of other books), bookstores, and classrooms. I enjoy not having to personally fold and staple hundreds of copies of something at 11pm. Unboxing printed, bound copies of my book and holding them in my hands is a magical experience.
But there’s a freedom in zines and open mics that traditional publishing can’t replicate. I’m never worried about whether or not my zines or spoken word poems are ‘marketable.’ You can write a deeply vulnerable poem about transphobia, then surround it with chaotic collage art and photos of curlews, and hand-stitch the spine. Nobody can stop you. At an open mic, you can relish in reading the gritty poem about your ex that you scrawled in your notebook on the bus on the way to the venue. Afterwards, a fellow queer poet will grip your hand-stitched zine in their hand, and reveal your poem made them feel seen for the first time in months.
In Connections/Collections: Interviews with Queer Zine Makers by Bianca Martin (she/her), Sam Quyên Huỳnh (they/them) says, ‘I love the DIY-ness of zines. They’re a medium that doesn’t have to be perfect; they are, in fact, prized for their jagged edges and rough words’.
The idea of roughness, of DIY-ness, of ‘jagged edges’ being seen as valuable feels deeply connected to trans poetics. Trans and gender diverse people spend huge portions of our lives being told to smooth ourselves out, to be more palatable and less complicated. But zines and spoken word poetry celebrate messiness, experimentation, contradiction, and vulnerability. They allow people to exist in all their unpolished, unruly glory.
Poetry itself often becomes a site of identity exploration. In (TRANS)FORM: Spoken Word as Queer and Transgender Testimony, Wesley Orion (published as Strobel; he/his) writes,
‘Poetry is a space for discovery and experimentation with different rules in form, shape, and wordplay and yet many of these rules in slam poetry and free verse are meant to be broken, just as we, ourselves, had broken society’s rules’ (2).
There’s something especially powerful about hearing those broken-and-remade selves out loud. In Magandjin (Brisbane), queer and trans literary culture thrives in spaces like Echoes from the Cave Inn, SpeakEasy Poetry, Ruckus Poetry Slam, and many more. While these aren’t exclusively trans events, trans and gender diverse people are very much a key part of their ecosystems. They are all spaces that embrace inclusivity, experimentation, and connection, creating room for trans and gender diverse writers to share their work, and build community. And at many open mics, people sell or swap zines between readings. Someone performs a poem, then afterwards hands you that poem in the form of a tiny handmade booklet. The boundaries between page and performance blur.
Importantly, these spaces are also accessible. You don’t need a degree or industry connections to make a zine. You just need access to a photocopier, and the confidence that comes from discovering how to fold one A4 piece of paper into an eight-page mini zine. Similarly, you don’t need an agent or a book deal to read at an open mic. You just need enough courage to put your name on a sign-up sheet and get up on that stage.
Most open mic spaces, especially queer-focused ones, are genuinely enthusiastic about first-time readers. There’s almost always people who will clap extra loudly and whoop encouragingly when you stumble through your first poem with visibly shaking hands. There is almost always someone afterwards who’ll say, ‘I really connected with that. Tell me more about your poetry!’
That kind of reciprocity matters. Because for trans and gender diverse people, art spaces are rarely just art spaces. They’re also our social spaces, support and survival networks, political education hubs, and accidental therapy sessions. Open mics and zine fairs create ephemeral, treasured moments for trans and gender diverse people coming together in community, saying, ‘here is what I made and wrote, here is who I am, here is who I am becoming.’ To quote trans poet Venus Selenite, ‘I’m no longer seeking or demanding representation from the worlds that exclude people like me; I’m creating it.’
References
Martin, Bianca. Connections/Collections: Interviews with Queer Zine Makers. Giabal and Jarowair Land (Toowoomba), self-published, held at the State Library of Queensland, 2024.
Nenyue, Sage. ‘trigger by Venus Selenite | CQ Interview’. Contemporary Queer, 24th May 2016. Available at: https://contemporaryqueer.com/2016/05/trigger-venus-selenite/
Strobel, Wesley. (TRANS)FORM: Spoken Word as Queer and Transgender Testimony. 30th March 2021. Otterbein University, Undergraduate Distinction Papers. Available at: https://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/stu_dist/95 (accessed 19th May 2026).
About the author
Rae White is a queer non-binary transgender writer, and author of Milk Teeth (UQP 2018), Exactly As I Am (UQP 2022), and All the Colours of the Rainbow (Lothian Children’s Books 2025), with illustrations by Sha’an d’Anthes. They won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, and have been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, Queensland Literary Awards, and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Rae is the Creative Director and Founder of Uplift Poetry, a community poetry initiative; Founding Editor of #EnbyLife, a journal for non-binary and gender diverse creatives; and a co-host on the 4ZZZ radio show Tranzmission.