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.


June 2025 Featured Books:
1. Songs of No Provenance by Lydi Conklin
2. Black Lesbian in White America and Other Writings by Anita Cornwell, edited by Briona Simone Jones
3. The National Alliance of Black Feminists: A History by Ileana Nachescu
4. Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation by Juliana Gleeson
5. Your Body of Water by Siouxzi Connor
6. Black Salt Queen by Samantha Bansil
7. The Blue Place (Aud Torvingen Volume 1) by Nicola Griffith
8. Arc of the Universe by Nikki Alexander
9. Achy Affects: Crisis and Compositions of Selfhood by CE Mackenzie
10. Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová, translated by Tereza Novická


Book descriptions:

Songs of No Provenance by Lydi Conklin: A suspenseful, wildly engaging debut novel by the award-winning author of Rainbow Rainbow, following a musician spiraling in self-doubt and self-searching after a night—and a relationship—gone wrong

Songs of No Provenance tells the story of Joan Vole, an indie folk singer forever teetering on the edge of fame, who flees New York after committing a shocking sexual act onstage that she fears will doom her career. Joan seeks refuge at a writing camp for teenagers in rural Virginia, where she’s forced to question her own toxic relationship to artmaking—and her complicated history with a friend and mentee—while finding new hope in her students and a deepening intimacy with a nonbinary artist and fellow camp staff member.

A propulsive character study of a flawed and fascinating artist, Songs of No Provenance explores issues of trans nonbinary identity, queer baiting and appropriation, kink, fame hunger, secrecy and survival, and the question of whether a work of art can exist separately from its artist.

Black Lesbian in White America and Other Writings by Anita Cornwell, edited by Briona Simone Jones: Black lesbian feminist, essayist, journalist, poet, author, and cultural worker, Anita Cornwell wrote extensively about her experiences as a Black lesbian in the United States during the twentieth century exposing the innerworkings of heteropatriarchy, misogyny, racism, the Jim Crow South, and white supremacy. A scholar of Black Lesbian Studies, Cornwell wrote the first collection of essays by a Black lesbian, Black Lesbian in White America, published by Naiad Press in 1983. These essays chronicle her experiences battling against misogyny, homophobia, and racism. Her writing also attends to love and familial loss. This reprint of Cornwell's classic essays on being black and lesbian, include a groundbreaking interview that Cornwell did with Audre Lorde. Black Lesbian in White America and Other Writings also includes previous unpublished poetry by Cornwell and features a revelatory introduction by scholar Briona Simone Jones.

The National Alliance of Black Feminists: A History by Ileana Nachescu: Founded in 1975, the non-partisan National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) played a critical role in the Black women’s liberation movement and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. The Chicago-based organization’s Black humanist feminism powered a singular dedication to building coalitions while influencing its historic set of comprehensive political, economic, and cultural demands.

Ileana Nachescu places the NABF’s history as the bridge between Black women’s social activism in the 1970s and the intellectual activism of the 1980s. Her account details the NABF’s work and how it reflected the group’s strong humanist belief in the transformation of all human beings. Nachescu also shows that the NABF’s post-Eighties erasure from movement histories is consistent with how many white feminists marginalized women of color and rejected their leadership. From there, Nachescu examines Black lesbians’ vibrant support of the NABF and shows how respectability politics pressured the group to support its lesbian membership in private but maintain a public silence on the issue.

A rare in-depth look at an overlooked organization, The National Alliance of Black Feminists tells an untold story of Black women’s liberation in the Midwest.

Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation by Juliana Gleeson: How freedom from binary thinking about sexual difference liberates us all

When a baby is born whose reproductive organs do not fit neatly into a binary idea of biological sex, they are deemed intersex. Often, doctors and parents decide to do surgery soon after birth, and in many cases administer hormones, to make intersex children fit into male/female categories. Intersex is treated as a medical problem: their physiologies are quickly dismissed as impossible, freakish, or even monstrous.

Hermaphrodite Logic is a history of intersex liberation, exploring both the campaigns and the thinking that began to challenge clinical approaches to sex from the 1990s. Existing between the tidiest attempts to categorise sex, intersex people are often mistreated by those trying to make them “fit” more limited views of sex. Their movement has had to challenge those that once spoke over them, and make sense of their lives using their own terms, and communities.

Hermaphrodite Logic foregrounds the experiences of sexually indeterminate figures both current and historical, and seeks to build up a thoroughgoing case for our emancipation.

Your Body of Water by Siouxzi Connor: Sex, death, nature and the ‘feminine’: an autofiction romance in four acts.

Your Body of Water is an interweaving of autofiction with hydro-feminist mythologies, exploring via the emotional landscapes of four rivers and four “tragic feminine characters” (Ophelia, Leda, the Lady of Shalott and Sappho) my own real life journey with a dose of tongue-in-cheek humour – through coming out in Australia, an abusive relationship in Berlin, and navigating queer love in the context of a world literally burning around us – and yet finding hope for the future in the stories of my ancestors before me.

Black Salt Queen by Samantha Bansil: There can be no victory without betrayal.
Hara Duja Gatdula, queen of the island nation of Maynara, holds the divine power to move the earth. But her strength is failing and the line of succession gives her little comfort. Her heir, Laya, is a danger—a petty and passionate princess who wields the enormous power of the skies with fickle indifference. Circling the throne is Imeria Kulaw—the matriarch of a traitorous rival family who wields recklessly enhanced powers of her own—with designs to secure a high-ranking position for her son and claim the crown for her family. Each woman has a secret weakness—a lover, a heartbreak, a lie. But each is willing to pay the steepest price to bring down her rivals once and for all.

Filled with passion, romance, betrayal, and divine magic, Black Salt Queen journeys to a gorgeous precolonial island nation where women—and secrets—reign.

The Blue Place (Aud Torvingen Volume 1) by Nicola Griffith: The first of Nicola Griffith’s beloved Aud Torvingen crime series.

Aud Torvingen is a rangy six-footer with eyes the color of cement and the tendency to hurt people who get in her way. Born in Norway, a land of ice and snow, she now lives in Atlanta, luxuriating in the lush heat and brashness, gliding easily between the worlds of the elegant elite and the criminal underbelly, beautiful and functional as a folded razor.

On an April evening between thunderstorms, Aud turns a corner and collides with a running woman. She catches the scent of clean, rain-wet hair, thinks, Today, you are lucky, and moves on—and behind her a house explodes in a tiger lily of flames. When Aud turns back, the woman is gone.

But the woman, Julia, returns, seeking Aud’s protection in a deadly international game of art forgery, drugs, money laundering, and murder. But Aud knows danger. When danger sits opposite and offers you the dice, you should walk away. Danger loads the dice, it cheats. But for Julia, Aud will play—and risk losing herself in that cool blue place where everything slows to crystal clarity and violence is bliss. . .

Nicola Griffith’s The Blue Place reshapes the noir suspense novel into something refreshing and excitingly new.

Arc of the Universe by Nikki Alexander: How do you design a system of government from scratch when you’ve lost faith in government itself?

Carrie Davenport, a renowned constitutional law professor, has been given the career opportunity of a lifetime. Project Mars, the brainchild of a billionaire tech tycoon, has ambitious plans to establish the first human settlement on Mars. And Project Mars selected her—a Black, queer, publicity-shy professor in North Carolina—to design a system of government for the colony.

Carrie eagerly begins researching how to craft a suitable constitution for space. But when she is stopped by the police in a case of mistaken identity and subjected to police violence, the filmed encounter thrusts Carrie into a spotlight she never asked for, putting her at the center of the ongoing debate about race and justice in the US. Suddenly, American democracy doesn’t seem like a shining beacon to carry into space. Carrie must decide whether to speak up—against the police brutality she endured, the tech-bro culture of Project Mars, and an even deeper underbelly of corruption behind the mission.

Can Carrie regain faith in herself and in society to craft the “government of the future” and prevent the prejudices of Earth from tainting human life beyond?

Achy Affects: Crisis and Compositions of Selfhood by CE Mackenzie: CE Mackenzie’s Achy Affects is a trans-genre memoir that boldly reimagines how we care for ourselves and our communities amidst relentless cultural, political, and ecological upheavals. It feels like we’re teetering on the edge of unprecedented crises. In the midst of this, as we wrestle with burnout and exhaustion, capitalism demands we push harder, achieve more, and become better. Mackenzie offers a radical alternative: give up the goal and just feel.

Organized into four key emotions—wonder, shame, shyness, and nostalgia, with a final meditation on ache itself—Achy Affects confronts the simplistic idea that feelings are either “positive” or “negative.” This tired binary demands we rehabilitate the bad into the good, whether or not this rehab is ethical, or even desirable. Instead, by tuning into the feeling of ache, we can resist these pressures and reclaim our agency through compositions of our own making.

In the spirit of public intellectuals like Maggie Nelson and Julietta Singh, Mackenzie weaves their personal experiences of crisis—divorce and coming out, working in drug outreach, top surgery, new parenthood, and traversing the Alaskan tundra—into a nuanced exploration of ache. Through this lens, Mackenzie invites us to live alongside pain, not as something to be fixed, but as something to be understood without judgment or expectation.

Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová, translated by Tereza Novická: Kin to the work of Leonora Carrington and Unica Zürn, Ceilings is a polyphonic novel that takes place in a mental hospital in Prague where the "narrator" is undergoing detox treatment for substance abuse. As the borders blur between inner experience and the outer world, between reality and dream, as the walls and ceilings hemming in the desire for freedom fantastically break open as if into the unknown and gender fluidly shifts between brother and sister, who are one and the same, Brabcová’s flights of imagination portray how difficult it is to “come out of oneself” and to engage with the other in a multifarious world that demands it of us, no matter how ambivalently.