Ryka Aoki’s Seasonal Velocities is not simply a collection of poetry, essays, and stories, it is a courageous excavation of memory and identity that spirals through time like a Möbius strip. First published in 2012 and honored as a 2013 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, this book invites readers into a landscape that is both deeply personal and fiercely political.
Through a shifting prism of seasons, Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn, Aoki crafts a narrative that defies linearity, refuses neat closure, and instead offers a vivid mosaic of queer and trans experience in all its pain, mess, joy, and transformation.
Structured in four sections named after the seasons, Seasonal Velocities maps a journey through emotional and spiritual weather. But this is not a simple metaphor for the passage of time. Aoki does not move gently from cold to warmth, despair to hope. Instead, she disrupts the idea that life unfolds predictably. Her winters bleed into summers, her autumns echo childhood losses, and her springs crack open under the weight of memories never fully thawed. In Aoki’s hands, time is nonlinear, memory is porous, and the self is a constantly shifting geography.
The winter section of the book is particularly arresting. It resists ease. Aoki begins in emotional permafrost, a place of familial estrangement and psychic pain so palpable that readers may hesitate to continue. One might bristle at the starkness, as if encountering dirty, refrozen slush when expecting soft snowfall. “Hell no I’m not reading this,” one might think, and yet, beneath the weight of trauma and survival, Aoki’s language gleams like ice in sunlight. Her poetry delivers sudden clarity, moments of pure, unflinching lyricism that demand pause and reverence.
As the book transitions into spring, the tonal shift is nearly imperceptible at first. Readers, previously trudging through emotional snowbanks, begin to thaw. There is warmth, renewal, and yes, sex. There is playfulness, pacing, muttering to oneself, signs of life resuming after numbness. Spring doesn’t arrive in a burst, but slowly, beautifully. Aoki’s words begin to burst open like buds, and her stories stretch toward the sun.
By summer, we are firmly in the realm of performance, both literal and figurative.
In “What’s Not to Love?” Aoki delivers a transcript of a performance art piece that includes, among other things, the introduction of her penis as a character. Here, she is bold, self-aware, and scorching with humor. “I was sweating by then, sunlight, blue skies, summer heat,” writes a reader overcome not only by the physicality of the imagery but by the daring vulnerability of the work. Aoki asks the audience not to gaze upon her as spectacle, but to meet her with humanity.
Aoki’s summer is not all sunshine, however. It contains moments of confrontation, particularly around issues of domestic abuse, where she sharply addresses how trans women are often disbelieved or criminalized when seeking protection. “You can’t call the police, they would probably take one look at the situation and think you were the attacker, especially if they read you as trans.” This is Aoki at her most direct, wielding prose as both mirror and blade, demanding justice for those rendered invisible or suspect by systems of power.
And yet, the most striking element of Seasonal Velocities may be its insistence on the complexity of the trans experience. It does not traffic in binaries, nor does it attempt to offer a singular narrative of trans life. In fact, the book actively resists commodified trans “representation,” instead offering raw, polyphonic truths. For some readers, especially trans ones, this refusal might feel too close to home. One reviewer, themselves a trans survivor of abuse within the community, admits to fearing the trans community more than finding solace in it. Aoki’s writing does not erase that fear. Instead, it holds it gently, while suggesting the possibility of reunion, not inclusion, not assimilation, but a return to self and community in ways that are authentic, complicated, and real.
Ryka Aoki is no stranger to the demands of art and activism.With an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University, she has been honored by the California State Senate for her work on behalf of transgender visibility and artistic expression. Her appearances in documentaries like Diagnosing Difference and Riot Acts, as well as her contributions to anthologies like Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, cement her as a powerful voice in contemporary queer literature. But Seasonal Velocities is not a résumé item, it is a map, a mirror, a kind of sacred text for those who have survived, those who are surviving, and those who are trying to understand.
In the end, Seasonal Velocities is not a book to be read quickly or casually. It is to be lived with, wrestled with, turned slowly in the hand like a strange and precious stone. It may begin with a chill, but it burns with a fierce and necessary heat. For trans readers, especially, it offers not just recognition, but reckoning. And perhaps, just perhaps, a way forward. As Aoki writes, not in anger or resignation, but in hopeful defiance, not outreach, not inclusion, not access… but reunion.
It is a gift to read this book. It is a responsibility, too. And it is one of the rare works of queer literature that doesn’t ask for our applause or pity, it asks us to show up fully, messily, and bravely, just as Aoki has done on every page.
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Photo via The Heroines of My Life.
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