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, 2026), selected by Dorothea Lasky as the winner of The New Delta Review Chapbook Prize. Her work appears 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 was the Claudia Emerson Scholar at the 2025 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Hailing from the Northeast, she currently haunts the Midwest.
What is the first transmission you received that altered your understanding of language?
I watched the music video for Fiona Apple’s "Criminal" when I was young, and the visionary boldness of her lyricism, her evasive gaze, and the camera like a spotlight on her face initiated me into intense timbres and vocalities. It reverberated and harmonized with the exquisite and sometimes dark rhythms of my life. I’m still as ensorcelled by the video; it reminds me that image, sound, tone, and light are all languages. We speak them. This chimera is what I have become devoted to. Poetry is the alchemical site where elements react, combine, transmute, or fail to do so. It is where the baroque and expressive registers of our lives can be recognized as real.
In what way does transness tune/re-tune the craft choices you make?
Transness, in my life, is a mysticism. It is that which brokers my being with the world’s being, and I’m interested in the space between those two beings. That space is a series of illuminations and shadows. So, too, I believe, poetry is the mystical, intervening both in the interstices of being where illuminations and shadows stageplay. Each of my poems hopes to push into the nowhere space where language gains consciousness, where it thinks for and realizes itself, where what is at stake is not just communication, but being and, even in suffering, a vial of hope, a droplet of love.
If your work could transmit beyond this moment, to future readers, or even back to a younger version of yourself, what would you want it to carry?
You must enter into union with the world. You must realize your own agential capabilities. As much as you are shaped by the world, you shape the world. Every word, every utterance, is an enchantment, and you must be humble in the face of that power, but you must also use it, and use it consciously. Transformation is not only possible, but it is also your imperative.