“Andrea Gibson accomplished much on their 49 years on this planet. Though Andrea desperately wished to have lived a longer life, they could not have possibly lived a fuller one.”

Andrea Gibson, a celebrated poet and performance artist who through their verse explored gender identity, politics and their battle with terminal cancer, died Monday at age 49.

The poem “How I Became a Poet” dwells for nearly five minutes on Andrea’s youth — “the tiniest kid in my class/hair cut so strange I looked like a third-grade boy/who gets picked on by his first-grade...