Transposium
Dani Yourukova
An arresting first collection of poetry in which Plato’s Symposium gets dragged to Aotearoa in 2023.
The body is an outpouring
of humours, and fluids, and grief. To love is
to heave that body against a foreign shore
and hope for the best.
— from ‘You are . . . ERYXIMACHUS’
Part philosophy thesis and part psychosexual Ancient Greek fever dream, Dani Yourukova’s Transposium adapts Plato into poetry, featuring queer longing, a choose-your-own-adventure apocalypse, Les Misérables slash fiction and love poems about dead philosophers.
Shameless, witty and hot with curiosity, these poems are preoccupied with the refashioning of gender, logic, language and form. Through relentless cross-examination of Socrates and associates, Yourukova combines reckless affection for the past, and a shimmering spectrum of anxieties around an uncertain future.
Alternately intellectual and irreverent, this collection is a playful take on the concept of the dialectic, weaving across text and time and the aching yawn of distance between us.
Author
Dani Yourukova is ‘a queer Wellington writer with great hair and a bad personality’ who completed their MA at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Their work has been published in takahē, Stasis, The Spinoff, Turbine | Kapohau and the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook.
Endorsements
‘Transposium is a glorious ride. It’s fun, smart, sharp, deep, awkward, sexy, tender, irreverent, full of ideas and feelings and so much else.’
— Helen Rickerby
‘In Yourukova’s contemporary queer reimagining, love’s philosophers shimmy in sequin bikinis. Those gay old Greeks are right at home in our house parties, proclaiming the timelessness of simping, of powerbottoms, of shipwrecked hearts. Tenderness becomes a bloodied cactus, and gender may be negotiable, but the babes remain undeniably hot. This book should be an instant classic, a choose-your-own supernova of literal glitter and scintillating desires.’
— Rebecca Hawkes