Action
Action is a love letter to the music, film, people, and places that have shaped Rivka Clifton's transition. A synthesizer’s knobs emulate the modulation of pleasure within a changing body. A text from a childhood friend ghosts the sadness existing within the joy of becoming oneself. The film Barbie triangulates how we experience others and how they experience us. Meditating on both the individual nature of transitioning and how it reverberates through a larger community, these essays pay loving homage to the shifting memorials of all bodies moving through time’s one-way terminal.
ISBN: 978-1-952897-53-5
72pg
Forthcoming on February 16, 2027
"It’s not often I finish a book that I immediately want to share with every trans person I know, but Clifton’s writing is akin to required reading. Her acute cultural critique of music and film, deftly interwoven with embodied experience, capture the many affirmations and contradictions inherent to transition—which is, Clifton reminds us, so often a state of being more than one of becoming. The essays in Action comprise a much-needed set of notes—a record, an archive, a lens—for those in transit to more expansively understand ourselves and the identities we collectively inhabit."
—Zoë Bossiere, author of Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir
"With prose just as precise as it is lyrical, Rivka Clifton has given us a perfectly-sequenced mixtape of trans metaphysics. Sound, speech, music and image merge to create a portrait of transness at once instantly recognizable and, like her writing, totally her own."
—Katherine Packert Burke, author of All Us Saints
"I spent the day rereading Action and I am just as convinced now as I was when I first read it that it's brilliant writing."
—Jordan Rice, author of Constellarium