Wild Shrew Literary Review (WSLR) is Sinister Wisdom’s online book review project. To complement the longer list of suggested books available for review, each month we feature a selection of books being released that month. If you would like to write a review, or if you would like to be added to the WSLR email list to receive the monthly complete book list with book descriptions, please email the WSLR editor, Chloe Berger, at chloe at sinisterwisdom dot org.


March 2025 Featured Books:
1. Baby Blue by Bim Eriksson
2. Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett
3. Buzzkill Clamshell by Amber Dawn
4. The Boxcar Librarian by Brianna Labuskes
5. We’re Gonna Get Through This Together by Z. Hanna
6. Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front by JEB
7. Aunt Tigress by Emily Yu-Xuan Qin
8. The body is where it all begins by Marcy Rae Henry
9. Tomatoes Beverly by Alix Perry
10. Reclaiming Southside by M. J. Coll


Book descriptions:

Baby Blue by Bim Eriksson: This haunting dystopian thriller graphic novel explores themes of mental health, queer identity, and the dangers of unchecked fascism.

In the not-so-distant future, twenty-something Betty lives in a fascistic society that menacingly polices mental health. When she is caught crying in public, the Peacekeepers take her to an Orwellian health facility to control her emotions. There, she meets the defiant Berina, who opens her eyes to an alternative reality: the Resistance. If Betty can navigate a rollicking underworld, where all manner of queerness is celebrated, she just might have a chance to strike back against the regime.

Deliciously twisted, fiercely contemporary, and backed by a Swedish pop soundtrack, Baby Blue is the dynamic graphic novel debut of comics artist Bim Eriksson. A vital manifesto about the need to express your unique identity in a chillingly conformist world.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett: From the New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things, a sparkling and funny new novel of entertainment, ambition, art, and love.

Cherry Hendricks might be down on her luck, but she can write the book on what makes something funny: she’s a professional clown who creates raucous, zany fun at gigs all over Orlando. Between her clowning and her shifts at an aquarium store for extra cash, she’s always hustling. Not to mention balancing her judgmental mother, her messy love life, and her equally messy community of fellow performers.

Things start looking up when Cherry meets Margot the Magnificent—a much older lesbian magician—who seems to have worked out the lines between art, business, and life, and has a slick, successful career to prove it. With Margot’s mentorship and industry connections, Cherry is sure to take her art to the next level. Plus, Margot is sexy as hell. It’s not long before Cherry must decide how much she’s willing to risk for Margot and for her own explosive new act—and what kind of clown she wants to be under her suit.

Equal parts bravado, tenderness, and humor, and bursting with misfits, magicians, musicians, and mimes, Stop Me If You've Heard This One is a masterpiece of comedic fiction that asks big questions about art and performance, friendship and community, and the importance of timing in jokes and in life.

Buzzkill Clamshell by Amber Dawn: Amber Dawn's latest poetry collection flaunts the chronically pained body as a source of lewd feminine power

As a novelist, memoirist, and poet, Amber Dawn regularly lays her heart bare in work that is fiery, raw, and intensely personal. In Buzzkill Clamshell, her third poetry collection, Amber Dawn circumvents the expectations of so-called confessional poetry, offering twisted mythmaking, extreme hyperbole, and lyrical gutter-mouthing that explore themes of sick and disabled queerness, aging, and desire.

With poems populated by severed heads, domme swan maidens, horny oracles, and other horrible purveyors of pleasure, Buzzkill Clamshell reads as if a leather dyke and a demonic goat had a baby - gleefully embracing the perverse while stomping its way through chronic pain and complex PTSD.

Already acclaimed for her candid and often kinky verse, Amber Dawn pushes further into trauma-informed eroticism with self-assured irreverence and uncomfortable abjectivity. Beneath her brilliant, carnivalesque imagery lies a prayer - not for the pain to end, but for finding fantastic new ways to cope with pain.

The Boxcar Librarian by Brianna Labuskes: Inspired by true events, a thrilling Depression-era novel from the author of The Librarian of Burned Books about a woman’s quest to uncover a mystery surrounding a local librarian and the Boxcar Library—a converted mining train that brought books to isolated rural towns in Montana.

When Works Progress Administration (WPA) editor Millie Lang finds herself on the wrong end of a potential political scandal, she’s shipped off to Montana to work on the state’s American Guide Series—travel books intended to put the nation’s destitute writers to work.

Millie arrives to an eclectic staff claiming their missed deadlines are due to sabotage, possibly from the state’s powerful Copper Kings who don’t want their long and bloody history with union organizers aired for the rest of the country to read. But Millie begins to suspect that the answer might instead lie with the town’s mysterious librarian, Alice Monroe.

More than a decade earlier, Alice Monroe created the Boxcar Library in order to deliver books to isolated mining towns where men longed for entertainment and connection. Alice thought she found the perfect librarian to staff the train car in Colette Durand, a miner’s daughter with a shotgun and too many secrets behind her eyes.

Now, no one in Missoula will tell Millie why both Alice and Colette went out on the inaugural journey of the Boxcar Library, but only Alice returned.

The three women’s stories dramatically converge in the search to uncover what someone is so desperately trying to hide: what happened to Colette Durand.

Inspired by the fascinating, true history of Missoula’s Boxcar Library, the novel blends the story of the strong, courageous women who survived and thrived in the rough and rowdy West with that of the power of standing together to fight for workers’ lives. And through it all shines the capacity of books to provide connection and light to those who need it most.

We’re Gonna Get Through This Together by Z. Hanna: We're Gonna Get Through This Together is a sharp and affecting debut story collection that takes a discerning look at what happens when people search for connection in an alienating world. Blending satire, realism, and speculative fiction, Z. Hanna writes incisively about race, class, gender, sexuality, art, and activism -- exploring the forces that bring people together and drive them apart. In the titular story, a white antiracist consultant tries to figure out how to sustain her work after her Mexican-American girlfriend abandons their coaching practice. "A Little to the Left" tells the story of a lesbian home from college who recruits a boy she knew in high school to help her become more queer. A supervisor at an "elective prison" in "The Birmingham Effect" struggles to motivate his team as the company navigates a public scandal. In "Heroes' Journey," a trans couple attends a psychedelic retreat for climate activists while trying to heal their relationship. Scintillating, funny, and heart-rending, We're Gonna Get Through This Together invites readers to investigate what separates us, while encouraging all of us to find a path forward together.

Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front by JEB: JEB (Joan E. Biren) first introduced viewers to her photographs in 1979 when she published Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, a groundbreaking celebration of women loving women. In the years that followed, JEB collaborated with poets, musicians, filmmakers, elected officials, healthcare providers, factory workers, spiritual leaders, and others who built communities and worked for political change. Her second book Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front, published in 1987, depicts the spirit and energy of this movement in more than a hundred emotionally resonant photographs that take us from passionate activism to thoughtful solitude, while remarks and remembrances from each woman photographed deepen the historic record. This reissue of Making a Way adds insightful new essays by Cheryl Clarke and JD Samson, resulting in an essential document of an era whose impact continues to be felt across our society today.

Aunt Tigress by Emily Yu-Xuan Qin: From debut author Emily Yu-Xuan Qin comes a snarky urban fantasy novel inspired by Chinese and First Nation mythology and bursting with wit, compelling characters, and LGBTQIA+ representation

Tam hasn’t eaten anyone in years.

She is now Mama’s soft-spoken, vegan daughter—everything dangerous about her is cut out.

But when Tam’s estranged Aunt Tigress is found murdered and skinned, Tam inherits an undead fox in a shoebox, and an ensemble of old enemies.

The demons, the ghosts, the gods running coffee shops by the river? Fine. The tentacled thing stalking Tam across the city? Absolutely not. And when Tam realizes the girl she’s falling in love with might be yet another loose end from her past? That’s just the brassy, beautiful cherry on top.

Because no matter how quietly she lives, Tam can’t hide from her voracious upbringing, nor the suffering she caused. As she navigates romance, redemption, and the end of the world, she can’t help but wonder…

Do monsters even deserve happy endings?

With worldbuilding inspired by Chinese folklore and the Siksiká Nation in Canada, LGBTQIA+ representation, and a sapphic romance, Aunt Tigress is at once familiar and breathtakingly innovative.

The body is where it all begins by Marcy Rae Henry: Marcy Rae Henry sings so much more than the body electric; she sings a cuerpo bilingue, a body gone awry amid perimenopause, a body nevertheless moonbright and halfnaked among the sagebrush. Henry peppers the poems of this scintillating chapbook with evocative housings and tangible accoutrements: a golden scarab in Egypt, the telltale signs of downsized childhood ("dry foods, frozen fruit, / packets of vegetable soup"), the "pastel art and fake plants" of a mammogram waiting room. Henry's lyrics bridge English and Spanish like the open-ended promise of a multilingual lifespan, which is to say they are pointed and timely and yield surprising portmanteaus: "vaccine which is vacuna / in Spanish and sounds like a cow in a cradle." Her speakers confuse want for want ("quiero querer means i want to want / but could also mean i want to love") and wound (as in "tightly") for wound (as in "painful"). They traverse the planet in search of—and escaping from—lovers like time-traveling globetrotters, arriving finally in a tightly composed ekphrasis in response to Dieter Roth's Karnickelköttelkarnickel, a poem that centers around the reappearance of an ex and the summer solstice in Iceland, where the "midnight sun stayed in the sky the way a flag stays on the moon." Whether luminously celestial or seared into the heart's memory, Marcy Rae Henry reminds us that "the body is where it all begins."

Tomatoes Beverly by Alix Perry: Over the course of 25 poems, Tomatoes Beverly explores the connection between the written word and the auditory environment of its creation. Intentionally curating a single-artist soundtrack for each poem, Perry underscores the otherwise subconscious influence our surroundings have on what we put back into the world. Throughout the collection, these musical influences cast their shadows on Perry's usual obsessions-isolation, longing, and visions of their alleviation-within the forests, beaches, and technological dystopias of the Pacific Northwest.

Reclaiming Southside by M. J. Coll: M.J. Coll grew up imagining herself as like her father’s son, but 1950’s Richmond, Virginia, wasn’t a welcoming environment for her to come of age. Venturing to the Midwest for college, M. J. came into her own as a lesbian feminist in her twenties, exploring relationships with other women, participating in Vietnam War protests, and advocating for citizens in crisis. But when her mother got sick, M. J. found herself back in Richmond, the city that she both loved and struggled to understand. Caring for her mother and reconciling with her father left her with no choice but to reclaim Southside, the neighborhood she grew up in and had sought so desperately to flee in her teens and twenties.

This collection of vignettes and poems about coming of age in the South speak both to M. J.’s personal experience as a young lesbian and the movements of the latter half of the twentieth century that have shaped America today. A testament to both how far we have come since the fifties yet how far we still need to go in our search for equality for the LGBTQIA+ community, M. J.’s story is both personal and political.