Dear Herculine, a harrowingly eloquent cri de coeur, melds consciousnesses and bodies across one and a half centuries, from 1832–2014. Intersexed writer Aaron Apps to intersex reader, the long-dead martyr to early gender-reassignment surgery, Herculine Barbin, speaks from a place so far inside of the abjected subject that it comes out the other end as estranged, engorged and gorgeous language, in letters comprising ‘two intersexed bodies composed of multiple parts, and the mess of flesh and text that stands between.’ Unlike Yeats, who desired to be consumed in artifice to escape the human condition, that of being ‘sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal/[That] knows not what it is,’ Apps plunges into the carnal killing floor with his nineteenth-century interlocutor, binding their fates as he is ‘shackled to a rotting double, rotting in the space between, rotting in the space of the letters.’ Apps’s fearlessness and the beauty of his prose inspires, pushing poetry, kicking and screaming and expiring with shame, to where it desperately wants to go. A brilliant achievement that defies the triumphalism of that descriptor, Dear Herculine is a cache of love letters urgently needed to heal this world.
