Transposium

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.