The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Temperance Aghamohammadi are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University. Thanks for reading.
My debut book BATTALION SHAPED GIRL (DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE, 2025) originated as a strange inquiry. I had just begun my graduate program when a host of immense violence germinated in my immediate and broader worlds. My mother had been diagnosed with cancer the previous year, which fragmented, truncated, and fractalized my life and identity. Mahsa Amini was soon murdered in Iran, along with Nika Shakarami, Sarina Ezmailzadeh, and too many others in the following WOMEN LIFE FREEDOM protests. I navigated a series of private and public violences as I reckoned with my transness – inflicted upon me by lovers, friends, and those in positions of power.
Delirious with a fever in the early autumn after one such violence, I wrote a poem called FETISH, which evolved into five poems, about the various modes of fetishization that women, and specifically trans women, face in this world – violence, sexualization, commodification, and so forth. These five FETISH poems became the spine of the book. Then, those poems beckoned more poems: a treatise on WOMEN LIFE FREEDOM, a new poetic form called the ‘transcript,’ an aisling in which the speaker inhabited the role of the spéirbhean.
The syntax of everyday life shimmered in the matrix of writing, and I wanted to probe it, peel back its skin, see what lurked beneath. What were the bones and sinew and blood of our lives? What did it mean to go out in public, to be witnessed, to be apprehended, to be perceived? What were the constructs that upheld even the most quotidian moments? Time and form dissolved in this process. Geography (of the body, of the mind, of the spirit) stretched into vast novel, occult, strange contiguities. Traversing cinema, Iranian popular music, opera, Irish forms, myth, and witchcraft as its environments, as its stages, the book demanded to be written. It insisted and developed upon its own inertia, its own chorus of voices from the past, present, and future, and I worked as the conduit, the medium for what wanted to be heard.
To break the spell of domination, to weave a new one, the poems of this book insisted upon a new grammar, a new form of utterance. Grammar comes from graimaire, one of whose definitions is “magic, incantation, spells.” Grammar casts a spell over our lives, and we can see its work in the interstices of our language. The poems became obsessed with the period: a small mark that ends a thought. But thoughts continue, and so does life, even after the worst violence, even after ecstasy. So the period became the unit of the utterance for BATTALION SHAPED GIRL, a mark that promised both ending and beginning, a mark that worked to score language onto the page, one that broke the line and the sentence, but broke them toward possibility. I wove together my past obsessions with meter and fixed form with my proclivity toward alchemy and experimental poetry, moving in and out of the expectations of the poetic line.
This utterance broke language into shards, which I gathered, combined, and recombined kaleidoscopically on the page until meaning proliferated ad infinitum. This seemed to me the true incantation of the book, the truest utterance. History, violence, and time keep rushing out of the wound of space and place; the period allows suspension, if even for a moment. That suspension is what the poems live in, move in, work through. They utter through gesture, movement, frame rate, brush stroke, and chord. They are bodies in assemblage.
I think of this book as a multitude within itself, multiplying itself; it enacts the battalion of its title. BATTALION SHAPED GIRL is proof of life. BATTALION SHAPED GIRL is a prayer. Is chant. Is a war cry. Is wail. Is polyphony. Is mourning and mortification. Is disaster and ecstasy. Is violet and violetness. BATTALION SHAPED GIRL is poetry, grimoire, book of prayer, auto-ethnography, theory, and deliberate disruption. The book is a will and testament of a girl who could never be.
REAL DAMAGE
when I get home,
I am just
an animal.
fanged. cowering
under the portrait
frame. sweating paint.
coming into high
relief. saturated
by my colors: giallo
ballet.
people like violence
when it’s easy
to understand.
I keep thinking
of the boundaries
of me. how to move.
how in movement.
anatomy is outline.
sketch. mannequin half
undressed.
shame.
violence isn’t a metaphor.
sometimes it feels like it is.
hit me.
hit me again.
what does that represent.
everyday I listen
to disco. everyday I want
to go out dancing.
everyday I watch the summer
flowers from the super
market die.
the club sign seethes:
REAL DAMAGE.
I resemble,
everyone says,
the girlish
saint burnt at the stake
in the museum picture:
ensnared
in chainmail.
sword-clad. three
angels to her clever
ears. war-
wound.
I’ve seen it.
SECOND SIGHT
[Ghosts came to my mother. In sleep. To warn her of their deaths. When she was a child. Her mother spoke with the dead. In her Victorian manor. Hands flourishing. Ouija board humming. Framed by her orange juice hair. I wish I could speak to her. She died before I was born. My mother will die too from the same disease. Snow falls like static outside. Air flame thick. Left alone. My eyes are tombs. It goes like this. I cross quietly. I am not a body. I do not pass. Through light. I am held]
GHOST RIVER
Cleave the head from
the spine
Fountain
mouth
Halcyon freshwater well
Winifred, who said no, whose ‘suitor’ took her head,
became a saint and resurrected
But, where her head fell, a spring swelled and ruptured ground
syntax image narrative
Water is a miracle’s utterance
[tooth-chipped woman gazes up from the tub]
[showerhead vomiting white chalk]
[bruised near-gone god]
God struck Winifred’s ‘suitor’ dead
Imagine a suit; imagine pursuit
Does a man wear clothes, or does he wear his actions
The street dolefully mutters in the summer rain
The life of concrete is a life of silence
A life you live, too
Something under your
feet as you stumble
from
the garden of martyrs
Uttering
Whispering
Early industrialists built cities over running water
What environmentalists now call “ghost rivers”
Forgotten, invisible
Invisible, yet not deceased
A stone Angel pours out two chalices into a white fountain
Listen
Listen
Soil-bent ear supplicant to the ghost
Your
bones are a dowsing rod
to
locate water underground
River speaking
through us through strata
of fossil
and
dirt
and
death
Currents through the
canal into the cochlea
Melody in attendance
You: River-Head
When you hear the invisible, you behold it
Underground, they, too, bend their ears up to listen to behold
Yes, what you have lived is your entire life
Lord, I have lived my entire life, an instrument
Temperance Aghamohammadi is an Acolyte of the Exquisite. A trans Iranian-American poet, medium, and critic, she is the author of BATTALION SHAPED GIRL (DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE, 2025) and Behnt (New Delta Review, forthcoming 2026), selected by Dorothea Lasky as the winner of The New Delta Review Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, New England Review, Fairy Tale Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She is an associate editor at RHINO Poetry and received the Claudia Emerson scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Hailing from the Northeast, she currently haunts the Midwest.
https://www.temperanceaghamohammadi.com/
https://www.discountguillotine.com/shop/p/battalion-shaped-girl-temperance-aghamohammadi
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Maw Shein Win's latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other literary journals. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, and the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awardee. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Low Residency MFA Program at Dominican University. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community. mawsheinwin.com
