Review by mk zariel
In honor of Trans Day of Visibility on March 31, we are sharing this week a review of a chapbook by transgender author Lazarus Halliwell. The reviewer, mk zariel, is also transgender.
fear not the brave pain, released on the self-publishing platform itch.io, is Halliwell’s nineteenth zine project, and is described as a collection of “poems about the void, mental health, and becoming the storm within.” Initially a submission to the Grim and Grimy Poetry Jam, this project explores themes of generational trauma and trans identity, adding to Halliwell’s impressive catalog of zine projects that detail their experiences as a transmasculine, neurodivergent creative. In addition to their poetry, they maintain the blog Open Sorcery and the musical project Candy For Trees, and regularly perform throughout the Milwaukee area and beyond.
The narrator is, like so many of us, caught in
an understandable stasis. They burn out, they bed rot, and they sometimes
neglect their own mental health. They “sleep, write, stare at the screen or
whatever / doesn’t feel like death for fifteen minutes or longer.” In a
particularly relatable turn of phrase, they unfortunately “watched a
[expletives deleted] white house press conference / yesterday because I was so
damn bored.” In short, they are an everyman–yet also one whose synesthesia and
poetic voice, at other moments, consume all. And it is this duality that makes
Lazarus Halliwell’s fear not the brave pain as captivating as it is.
Image Source Lazarus Halliwell
The zine opens with a bold statement, one in which the narrator is “the result of two generations of fire.” It describes a family history of traumatic compulsion, of literal and figurative pyromania, of insecure attachment––then orders their audience to “be prepared for me to / douse / your / flame.” The following poem, while slightly more subdued, continues the use of fire imagery to describe the painful yet alluring nature of hyper fixation. Pretty soon, however, Halliwell carries on the theme of obsession by observing what can be inferred to be a codependent interpersonal dynamic, declaring that “freedom without you is silence / it is madness” and “i return with the / tide of your joy.” The first half of fear not the brave pain is essentially an exploration of the narrator’s obsessions, from familial entanglement to romantic love to intellectual special interests, and uses synesthetic imagery to bring these all-consuming desires to life.
A feeling of possibility permeates the rest of the zine, with poems such as “love letter to the predawn hours” describing flow states, nocturnality, and a sense of neurological freedom––yet anxiety is also a prevalent theme. In one poem, Halliwell describes their experience with performance anxiety, harkening back to the rumination described in previous pieces: “but every / time I’m in front of a crowd now / there are no friends, my vision morphs and slants / and instead there is a monster of 512 eyes, / all seeing, all seething.” However, this chapbook does not sit in a place of dread but instead makes peace with the entropy. Toward the end, one line says that “when I was twenty-five, a boyfriend called me / what I was, a barely contained hurricane”––a sentiment that sums up most of the text.
In the world of fear not the brave pain, chaos is both a source of pain and power, something to be studied, reclaimed, and honored in verse. And in an era of ever-increasing entropy, some generative and some otherwise, this text carries an oddly reassuring energy to it, without ever harkening to a false perfection of certainty. Halliwell’s verse is, in their own words, barely contained––a quality that, in turns, gives readers the chance to delight in uncertainty, reclaim stigmatized neurologies, and embrace madness.
mk zariel {it/its + masc terms} is a transmasculine neuroqueer theater artist, Best Of The Net and Monarch Award nominated poet, movement journalist, and BashBack aligned anarchist. it is fueled by folk-punk, Emma Goldman, and existential dread. the author of Voidgazing (2026, Whittle Micropress), Different with Him (2026, Rockwood Press), and Boy Apparition (2025, Vinegar Press), it can be found online at https://mkzariel.carrd.co/, creating conflictually queer-anarchic spaces, writing columns for Asymptote and the Anarchist Review of Books, and being mildly feral in the great lakes region. it is kinda gay ngl.
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