To the Moon and Back
Eliana Ramage
Avid Reader Press, 2025, 448 pages
$30.00

Reviewed by Sam Carter

To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage is an absolutely stunning novel following Steph Harper from adolescence to adulthood as she runs from the dissatisfaction of her life and toward the farthest possible destination—the moon. Largely beginning in the Cherokee Nation’s capital, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, Ramage’s debut novel spares no expense in taking readers on a journey spanning across geographies, time, and of course, space. As a sucker for messy and occasionally frustrating queer characters, To the Moon and Back offered all the sorrows and joys I was looking for. With NASA having just launched their first mission to the moon in over fifty years, there is no better time to dive into this book!

What to say about this novel that can possibly do it justice? To the Moon and Back is incredibly rich, holding a mirror to readers and characters alike and challenging us to reflect upon our pasts and how we’ve come to understand them. Particularly Steph, our lesbian lead, is fantastically messy and self-focused. As she moves throughout the story, every bit of resistance Steph faces is met with a greater assertion of control. Paralleling the incredibly strict guidelines to astronaut candidacy, Steph attempts to mold her life in the way she desperately wants it to be. Her near apathetic focus creates a shaky fabrication of reality at constant risk of collapse.

Ramage additionally foregrounds a number of other women throughout the story such as Steph’s sister Kayla, her mother Hannah, and her college girlfriend, Della, weaving together intersections and diversions regarding race, class, sexuality, and indigeneity among them. From those uncritically nostalgic toward their Cherokee heritage, to those who want nothing to do with it, to those who were divorced from their history and culture in infancy, Ramage displays an amalgamation of experience that never feels too convoluted or rushed.

Della is introduced to the novel near the end of Part One, bringing a refreshing narrative that contrasts Steph’s growing self-obsession. Della, separated from her Cherokee heritage by a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) when she was a baby, strives to reaffirm authority over her life. Enacted in 1978, the ICWA was a piece of legislation intended to disrupt the forceful separation of indigenous families and communities, granting tribes jurisdiction in the fostering and adoption of indigenous children. Della’s and Steph’s narratives immediately collide as they begin college, culminating in illuminating—if tragic—revelations for them both.

Overall, To the Moon and Back is about love and how we internalize and engage with our past in the present. Temporalities are not confined to a strict binary of good and bad, just as love is not isolated to a single notion of purity. Steph’s journey depicts the parallel and intersectional experience of life, in which one’s ambition can act as both a balm, and as a hubris-fuelled form of self-destruction. However, in engaging with the differing cultivations of our pasts, Ramage foregrounds the power of reflection, in which looking back can incite a future bettered by change.

Sam Carter is a butch archivist and MA student at University College Dublin in Ireland. When she’s not reading, you’ll find her listening to dreadfully loud rock music and wandering toward the beach. You can find her on instagram @sam.carter83.

Bloodmercy
I.S. Jones
Copper Canyon Press, 2025, 88 pages
$16.00

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

This debut collection of poetry, Bloodmercy by American/Nigerian poet Itiola S. Jones, is a reimagining and retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel. In the original narrative from the Bible, Adam and Eve, the first humans, are living the life of paradise in the Garden of Eden. They are forbidden to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, but a serpent tempts Eve, and Adam and Eve are cast out from the Garden. God inflicts punishment upon them. For Eve, her punishment means that she will suffer the pains of childbirth and live her days in dutiful obedience to her husband. Together, Adam and Eve bear many children, including Cain and Abel. In the Bible, Cain kills Abel in a fit of jealousy when God prefers Abel’s sacrificial offering to his, thus becoming the first murderer.

“Violence is a failure of communication” (5) is the opening line of this collection. Cain and Abel are reimagined as sisters whose love for each other becomes fraught with envy as they both compete for the attention of their negligent father. In this version of the story, Cain does not kill Abel. Instead, the girls’ bodies blossom as they experience the shame of their mother Eve’s sin in the Garden. The girls come into their own budding sexuality. Bloodmercy follows the sisters, Cain and Abel, as they grow from girlhood into womanhood—becoming women who ultimately discover the limits of power and control, violence and sexuality, faith, death, and mankind’s failed attempts to hold dominion over the world. In another poem, “We Are Soft Between Hours,” a declaration of Cain’s love for her sister, she says: “What pleasure possesses you, / sister, I want for myself. In this night, everything is about the moon— / even her absence, even you. Eventually, someone wants something, / that’s the nature of power” (21).

Bloodmercy was selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 American Poetry Review’s Honickman Prize. Jones is the first woman of color to receive this prestigious award. Nicole Sealey remarks in her introduction to this collection: “. . . Bloodmercy asks, from its opening to closing poems: What does mercy look like? Rather than fully formed renderings, Jones offers composite sketches—images mined from the poet’s sharp and singular vision. With verse from the perspective of Eve, and a thread of poems reimagining Cain and Abel as sisters, Bloodmercy wrestles with the idea of grace, vis-à-vis myth and memory, gender and sexuality, with the utmost urgency” (1).

These poems are located in an evolving remote natural landscape, a mythic realm set in a time between the Old Testament and the modern era. The two girls begin to mature, to gaze toward heaven, and pose questions to God. Within “After the Offering Ritual, Cain Carries Abel Home,” a kind of prelude in Cain’s voice, Jones describes the moment of the sacrificial offering to God. In the Bible, it was the offering ritual that provoked Cain’s jealousy and the murder of his brother. In Jones’s poem, Cain does not slay her sister. Rather, she shows Abel tenderness and mercy after the killing of the sacrificial goat.

We have blood and dirt,
together they make God. And what does mercy look like
between humans? A sister reaching to lift a sister
from the ground. When I say a love that will end us,
I mean ‘mercy.’ Remember, I offered you my hand once.
Push me away if you like (5).

All the voices in these poems are spoken by Cain, Abel, and Eve. However, Bloodmercy focuses, in large part, on the voices of the sisters as they grow into womanhood. “Daddy’s Girl,” again spoken by Cain, begins with an invocation to God. “Lord, forgive me. I am my father’s child: / cunning and arrogant with beauty. / Adam’s first. Daughter prince. / No one beneath God tells me what to do” (15). She continues in this poem with a celebration of her childhood:

I am 8
and can only see my mother for her gender—
exhausted to a numb, wounded, bitter
to the touch. The feminine urge to be
my father’s best boi, I boy’d better
the other boys— peed standing up,
won every game of ‘nut check,’ shot
my first kill by 10 . . . (15).

Jones’s verses discomfort and attempt to startle her readers, as in her poem “Sister’s Keeper”: “I peeled back my skin to unveil a body / Baba would find use in” (10). An understanding of the self through wound is a recurrent theme; these poems lean toward the grotesque. The poet, talking about her sense of imagination, has said: “There’s a delight I have in making language around the things that often bring us discomfort. Discomfort is not something that is a deterrent for me. If anything, the things that make me the most uncomfortable is where the art-making for me begins. I also think about how the grotesque, at least in the context of this book, is a measure of survival” (Summer Farah, Electric Lit interview).

There is so much to explore in this powerful collection—Bloodmercy. The word “mercy” means “divine gift,” implying that mercy is something only God can give. Blood means kinship, connection, a bond. Jones’s childhood self moves through these poems into womanhood in the persona of Cain. Her self-mythmaking is her way of rewriting her own history. Jones has also revealed that when she wrote this book, she imagined herself as Cain—mirroring the time of her own coming of age and emergence into womanhood. To the poet, “blood” represents a bond, familial connections, and trust, despite the dysfunction of her childhood. By examining the concepts of blood and mercy, these poems explore the meaning of violence, desire, queerness, faith, power, and control, alongside the human need for mercy and forgiveness.

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College, she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar in Nonfiction. Her new poetry collection is OXYGEN II (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2025).

Hauntings
Vernon Lee, in conversation with Gretchen Felker-Martin and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Smith & Taylor Classics, 2025, 198 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Rivaa Ubrani

Vernon Lee’s Hauntings is a lusciously gothic quintet of stories whose intricate Italian settings echo with the ghosts and goddesses of half-remembered girls and women. Writing behind the pseudonym “Vernon Lee,” Violet Paget was one of the forerunners of supernatural fiction whose various stories were serialized in British literary journals during the late 1800s.

Despite writing amidst the general late Victorian craze for ghost stories, Lee distinguished her tales with their embodied settings, at once intimate and alienating to readers. Drawing from her own rich history of travelling, Lee’s nomadic characters radiate an “in-betweenness”; they neither fit into Lee’s Italy as locals nor into Lee’s world as persons, tending as they do to flicker between the real and the spectral realms of being.

Lee’s tales, with their ambiguous endings and psychological half-thrills, are in a sense deeply queer stories. Lee herself was both a staunch feminist and a pacifist who used her pseudonym proudly in both her private and public life and was known to dress in “mannish” attire. This, coupled with her refusal to abide by the heteronormative marital norms of the late Victorian period and her intense friendships with women, has led critics to read Lee as a queer woman.

Though confirming such a claim is elusive and perhaps historically invasive, lesbian experiences nevertheless color the pages of Hauntings. Morally gray women and feminine men take the starring role in all Lee’s stories, blurring the lines between guardian angels and succubi. They play witches, murderesses, and phantasmic Italian noblewomen who both bless and curse the tales’ protagonists with equal vigor.

What truly haunts Lee’s characters, though, is the power of art. Whether in sculpture, as song, or as a carefully-crafted portrait, the artistic looms over Lee’s Hauntings as a wraith-like presence—an unattainable ideal at once hankered-for and horrifying. Her collection thus operates in line with one of poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s most notable quotes: “For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure, / and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains / to destroy us” (“The First Elegy”).

The most moving of Lee’s tales is her opening story, “Amor Dure.” A short story conveyed in epistles that frames the slow coming-of-age of a sea witch from an uncannily detached perspective, this tale combines mythic tropes and Mediterranean imagery to bolster the emotional impact of its slowly unravelling yarn. Cursed to bring every soul she encounters to romantic ruin, this sea witch inverts the norms of the seaside Italian coast she washes onto, effectively annihilating them with her beauty.

I invite everyone to be annihilated by this and the rest of Lee’s uncannily gorgeous meditations on the artistic process as soon as you can.

Rivaa Ubrani (she/her) is an Indian poet, editor, and aspiring children’s book author, based in London, where she is pursuing an MA in Shakespeare Studies and interning at Sinister Wisdom. Her work often traces the intersections of mental illness, myth, and the hyperreal.

The Soulmate Strategy: My Imperfect Plan to Conquer Heartbreak and Find True Love
Corey Seemiller
She Writes Press, 2026, 392 pages
$17.99

Reviewed by Kara Zajac

This story is exactly why I love memoirs. You experience someone’s real journey right along with them: the raw, relatable vulnerability of heartbreak and recovery. It’s a story so personal that by the end, you feel like one of Corey’s friends. The Soulmate Strategy is a hilariously funny tale, yet it’s painful to read at times because you just want to wrap her in a bear hug and tell her: it’s going to be okay. Keep going! Corey captures the magic of memoir in this heartfelt quest to find the one. As a scientific person myself, I completely related to her equation-based approach to healing and love: make a step-by-step recovery list, meticulously complete each task, and poof. The result should be the perfect happily-ever-after, right? If only life and love were that easy.

Corey has been successful in her life. She has a great career that she’s truly passionate about, is raising a healthy-minded, well-rounded child, and has friends, but there’s one thing that’s missing: a soulmate. After watching her parents stay in a difficult, mismatched marriage for too long, she vowed early on never to repeat their mistakes. What she has learned through observation is that love eventually leaves, as with her dad when he packed his bags and went away, and two failed long-term relationships that ended in breakup.

Determined to fix the problem by strategically getting over heartbreak, she tries to hurry through the suffering and find true happiness by joining meetup groups, working out her angst through strenuous hikes, creating mantras, going to therapy, and having several close friends to bounce ideas off of. She writes her step-by-step catalog into what she calls “The Plan.” When The Plan doesn’t create her desired outcome within the specific timeline she envisions, Corey goes to greater lengths, getting advice from several different psychics, practicing the law of attraction, adding Reiki and crystal therapy to her routine, doing online “practice” dating, and eventually finding a past-life regression therapist (which sounded so cool; I can’t wait to find someone near me who does this).

Once she has narrowed the search to two candidates, Corey continues to ruminate, overanalyzing her connection to each person, placing much emphasis on the psychic’s details and looking for universal signs instead of embracing her own feelings, hoping that her choice will be the right one. While everyone can learn from their past mistakes, we see Corey’s almost paralyzing fear of making the wrong decision, so much so that she keeps the psychic’s analysis from her two prospects, hoping that external signs will choose for her and guide her path correctly. However, Corey eventually realizes that not everything can be left up to fate. The confusion she felt from waiting for signs from the universe was, in due time, replaced by trust in herself. She says: “While I do still trust the universe, I learned the value of embracing my own free will and not overemphasizing the importance of spiritual messaging during vulnerable times in my life” (372).

At the end of the book, Corey reveals The Plan and analyzes the wins and/or failures of each step, which I thought captured the essence of her experience completely. As a writer with two degrees in science, I relate to her approach of creating a step-by-step plan to achieve the end result, which was funny, considering it was about finding your true love, but completely compatible with a science-based brain. It was a nice personalized detail to include; it almost made me want to print it out and tape it to my closet door. For example, she says:

I’ve never been one to keep a secret. So, holding on to the psychic prophecy not only weighed on my conscience but also put at risk two very important relationships in my life. I will forever be grateful to both of them for accepting my confession and choosing to continue our connections. The whole situation, though, prompted me to add “Be transparent” to The Plan so I would never find myself harboring another secret (373).

Another hilarious aspect I completely loved about this book: instead of using the characters’ names, she kept them anonymous by labeling them with details specific to each one. There’s the friend she met at a meetup pool party, Naked and Afraid; the social-media friend, TikTok; the online date with no in-person chemistry, East Coast; the date where they went shopping, Pants; and the hiking friend who loved bird watching, Birds. This was a very creative and comedic way to get around the stickiness of friends and loved ones being overwhelmed and concerned when included in your life’s story.

By the end, Corey realizes that healing takes time and, sometimes, you just have to go with the flow and let life unfold on its own. This book is for anyone who has struggled with perfectionism, and offers the reader a chance to learn through someone else’s struggle to heal and move past their childhood trauma, finding love tightly packaged with endearment, laughter, and sensitivity. I feel anyone can learn about themselves by reading and understanding someone else’s struggles. The story is also a reminder that we all have similar struggles, and no one goes through life alone. If you’d like to follow Corey, you can find her inspirational stories on TikTok (@coreyseemiller) and Instagram (@lesbianlovelessons.corey), where she interviews lesbian-identified people who share a lesson they have learned about love.

Kara Zajac is a freelance writer, chiropractor, mother, wife, entrepreneur, and musician. Her debut, The Significance of Curly Hair: A Loving Memoir of Life and Loss, won the 2025 IPPY Silver Medal for Inspirational Nonfiction and was chosen for “The Best Books We Read in 2024” by the Independent Book Review. Its follow-up, The Special Recipe for Making Babies, was a finalist in 2022’s Charlotte Lit/ Lit South Awards for Nonfiction. Kara’s work has been published in Bay Area Reporter, Lesbian.com, Voraka Magazine, Story Circle Anthology, Imperfect Life Magazine, Ripped Jeans and Bifocals, and Just BE Parenting. Kara keeps people laughing with her blog www.KaraZajac.com and is happy to speak at book clubs and grief-support groups. She resides in North Georgia with her wife, Kim, and daughter, Senia Mae.

Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems
Robin Becker
University of New Mexico Press, 2026, 162 pages
$21.95

Reviewed by Ellen Miller-Mack

It’s April 17, 1977. The feminist poetry press Alice James Books is four years old. In the previous year, Robin Becker’s first collection of poems was published alongside Helena Minton and Marilyn Zuckerman in Personal Effects. All three come to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for a reading; they were invited by Spectrum, the campus literary journal. As I listen to Robin read “A Woman Leaving a Woman” I feel my young life change indelibly.

Poetry changes us. It’s been altering internal landscapes of humankind with powerful revelations for thousands of years. Lyric narrative poems illuminate paths forward through a broad range of feelings. Becker’s Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems, traverses fifty years of feminist observation, depth, humor, and a very particular bold voice. As an out lesbian since the 1970s, she has inspired generations of queer women with her exploration of relationships that are unique to us, as well as Jewish identity. Becker’s work also has a universal quality, with themes ranging from family dynamics to loss.

In Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems, Stephanie Burt writes, “Lyric poems show you yourself and somebody else; they show you what you have in common, not with everybody, but with somebody else, which means they can be mirrors and also windows.” With this quote in mind, I sit with all of Becker’s books stacked in front of me, breathing them in. Becker’s poems are both mirrors and windows. There is a translucency and clarity to her work. Her poems can take you by surprise as they skillfully guide you towards a moment that leaps into your own inner life. There’s a wide range of subjects in this expansive collection: well-crafted poetic responses to shifts in the poet’s internal landscape through connections with memory, people, and animals in her life. Sometimes a sketch. Sometimes a painting. Sometimes unexpected. Becker’s poems move with a smooth glide. It can feel somewhat restrained, with perspective from a slight distance, void of palpable vulnerability like other poets. Perhaps it’s a result of her awareness of the cultural significance of her work.

I like to imagine Robin Becker working a poem like a chunk of clay. The clay is the idea, and the lines are the myriad shapes she makes with it. She consistently demonstrates intellectual prowess as well as playfulness with language. She can pluck an idea from thin air, and put it to work. When she juxtaposes ideas or feelings, she provides tension, friction and a bit of distance. The poem “Semblance” begins, “The dog I love is turning into my father” and though some may experience this line with a wave of affection for both, that is not where the poem goes. It is explicitly about her old dog’s behavior—he can’t help it, he’s gotten a bit ornery—and implicitly about her father who “never had much use for my conversation // and showed his teeth when I / displeased him / collared as he was / and made to heel by his betters” revealing trauma endured by both her rescue dog and her father. The poem is written in tercets with run-on sentences and no punctuation, and I can’t think of another Becker poem utilizing this form. As is typical of her poems, there is no neat resolution, and the ending is startling.

There are new poems in Midsummer Count, followed by a journey through Becker’s distinguished career, with poems from all eight of Becker’s collections. Among the new poems, “You Have to Stay Ahead” is about pain with an expertly sustained train metaphor. Here are the first eight lines:

of the pain, she said, it’s a high speed
train gaining momentum,
headed for the town with your name.
You have to stay calm, seated, sedated
as the locomotive nears, curves
into view, freighted with your fears
of complication, infection,
pain’s hue and viscosity.

“The Walking Cure” contains various numbers documenting time, distance, and other measures, as if they could somehow contain the grief of losing a sister.

On June 24, 1986, she walked twenty-three
and-a-half miles, noting, “Hot. 97 degrees.”
On July 5, twenty miles in the rain.

In “Rescue Parable” we witness a rescue dog who “digs with his forepaws a grave, // and with his nose, dutiful as one enslaved, / covers with dirt the coming poverty.” Becker writes frequently about dogs and other animals. The subject in this poem is deep, persistent trauma and how nearly impossible it is to overcome: a wrenching situation for all of us mammals.

“Raccoon” presents the creature who is “Comedian of the hard frost, / deft champion of screw-on tops” now dead in the middle of the road and somehow lovingly paired with her zayde, her grandpa. Becker makes these kinds of connections work.

In “The Fix” she explores her friend Harvey’s approach to repair, creatively using whatever materials and tools we have in the moment, with a splash of magical thinking:

Harvey says it will hold for now meaning the gasket
he’s rigged to stop the leak in the water tank

And here, exquisite tenderness, in the love poem “The Subject of our Lives.” It ends with:

. . . Trust me, you say, and I am struck by the force
of your voice, the imperative form of any verb spoken in bed. Come home.
No, stay where you are. Longing will serve us while snow thickens
the sidewalks, delays the subways, tightens every street in town.

Becker’s playful side appears from time to time. In “UPS,” one of the new poems, she fantasizes about a “short marriage,” because for her, it’s too late for a long one:

UPS driver in brown shorts
with a pencil parked behind her ear.
I know she likes me by the way
she takes a granola bar from my hand,
shouting “hey, thanks”, as she runs
to the brown box of her truck.
I think she’d like to have coffee, talk
about her childhood, her favorite books
and movies, her vacation in P-town.

“Men as Friends” with an amusing first line, “I have a few which is news to me,” concludes with a gift from James the retired Marine who leaves two rainbow trout in her refrigerator, a nod to Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.”

Robin Becker has been serving poetry superbly for decades. Becker’s poems are carefully constructed with inner logic, but they are not cold. As through an open window, her figurative language continues to invite us in. She illuminates the small truths of our lives with clarity. For those who identify as feminist, lesbian, or Jew, Becker’s poetry is both validation and celebration.

Ellen Miller-Mack is a nurse practitioner (retired/rewired) with an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Her first book, When I Was a Grateful Mammal, won the 2025 Sappho’s Prize in Poetry from Headmistress Press. Her book reviews have appeared in Rattle, Valparaiso, Bookslut, The Rumpus, The Poetry Café, and Poetry Foundation. Ellen co-wrote The Real Cost of Prisons Comix (PM Press). She is the host of Poet Talk, a live radio program on WMUA. It is also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Crying in LA: Sapphic Longing in Tongues and Tears
Jasmin Benward
Tehom Center Publishing, 2025, 158 pages
$23.05

Reviewed by Nino Arobelidze

Jasmin Benward’s Crying in LA: Sapphic Longing in Tongues and Tears refuses to separate desire from dignity. Structured through an emotional forecast of “Sunny Skies,” “Partly Cloudy,” “Chance of Rain,” and “Showers,” the collection traces the intimate weather of longing with intention. Early poems dwell in flirtation and sensory closeness, while later pieces move toward rupture, grief, and a hard-won clarity shaped by loss. The sequencing feels deliberate. The poems read less like a loose gathering and more like a carefully arranged album, complete with refrains, tonal shifts, and thematic reprises.

The voice is direct, musical, and scene-driven. Early poems linger in everyday tenderness, where coffee, food, sound, clothing, and shared ritual become portals into intimacy. “Over Coffee” and “Come Close” situate affection within cultural specificity and shared presence. Affection unfolds through repetition and shared ritual, allowing intimacy to take shape through presence rather than declaration, as in the line “When you come close / You feel like a Sunday” (19). Elsewhere, Benward’s lines move with the confidence of spoken word while retaining visual texture and lyric punch. The result is work that feels both conversational and immersive.

Intimacy is positioned as something sacred rather than performed for an external gaze. The erotic poems move with unapologetic agency, framing desire not as spectacle or confession but as connection and choice. In poems such as “Sex Magic” and “Sub,” desire is rendered as lived, embodied experience rather than abstraction, where sexuality becomes a site of imagination and devotion, as in the line “I hear the grind of your chains drip from your body” (60). Intimacy remains deliberate and embodied, grounded in the speaker’s control of voice and perspective.

Throughout the collection, desire is situated within explicitly Black cultural and political realities. Poems such as “Passport” and “Selfish Black Futurism” expand the scope of longing beyond romance. The speaker names censorship, land, diaspora, disability, autonomy, and surveillance as lived contexts that have shaped her sense of intimacy and visibility. These forces appear not as distant ideas, but as conditions the speaker moves through. Yet love is never abstract. It unfolds inside systems that shape who is seen, protected, or erased. “In this world I am chosen / Other people’s opinions don’t exist” (107). By anchoring intimacy within these realities, the collection insists on specificity over universality.

As the emotional arc shifts into “Chance of Rain” and “Showers,” the poems turn toward heartbreak and self-interrogation. Modern forms of absence appear through social media monitoring, quiet surveillance, and the contradictions of no contact, where the speaker watches, checks, and registers presence without response. As “Banned” captures, “I know I occupy stolen lands / why don’t you? / I’m governed by sacred law / I have a voice, and / I have choices” (149). Benward renders longing through these small, contemporary rituals of looking and waiting.

By the time the collection arrives at the title poem, the focus broadens to vocation and inevitability. The speaker affirms her identity as storyteller, musician, and witness, declaring, “I praise the moment that / Happy tears, are / What have me crying in LA” (p. 156). Longing has not defeated her. It has shaped her language. In Crying in LA, tears are not only about heartbreak; they register ambition, authorship, and the persistent belief that one’s voice is meant to take up space.

Crying in LA offers a portrait of Black sapphic longing that is sensual, funny, political, wounded, and luminous. It honors pleasure without trivializing it and documents heartbreak without romanticizing it. Benward’s collection reminds readers that to desire deeply is also to risk deeply, and that telling the truth about that risk is its own form of power.

Nino Arobelidze is a writer, vocalist, producer, and mixer working across music, film, and narrative forms. Her work explores longing, identity, and emotional architecture through sound and language. She creates under the moniker Girl Named Nino.

DEAD BOYS IN SPACE
Sara Youngblood Gregory
YesYes Books, 2026, 102 pages
$22.00

Reviewed by Marisa Lin

Sara Youngblood Gregory’s debut full-length poetry collection, DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, is an imaginative fusion of lyricism, experimental forms, and speculative fiction that explores otherness, grief, illness, and queer resistance in American history. In this collection, Youngblood Gregory, award-winning lesbian journalist and editor of Sinister Wisdom’s forthcoming issue Butch-Femme Renaissance, demonstrates a remarkable ability to join poetic depth with incisive social critique in this brilliantly crafted collection.

Mourning their brother and generations of queer elders while navigating their own queer identity, relationships, and parental ruptures, the central speaker of the collection falls upon supposition to fill the gaps of what they lost and perhaps can never be known. The collection itself begins with the speaker envisioning their brother, whom they have never met, “going to clubs / on the moon. . . where Friday nights are / for diamonds / instead of air” (11). So begins the collection’s metamorphosis of queer grief and its political origins, which Youngblood Gregory traces to the U.S. government’s historical response to the AIDS epidemic that significantly impacted gay communities.

DEAD BOYS IN SPACE enters into the aftermath of this devastation and offers a nuanced critique of the political dynamics of this era. By intersecting the hostility of this era with the country’s efforts in the Cold War space race, Youngblood Gregory’s collection illuminates the ways American imperialism and anti-queer politics are enmeshed together through ideologies of control and expansionism while offering a testament to the enduring ability of queer lives to resist, mourn, conspire, and ultimately find home in the most inhospitable of places.

As all grief does, this book begins with absence: of the speaker’s unnamed, gay brother, of the generations of queer elders decimated by the AIDS epidemic. As the speaker comes to terms with the “paper trail of old men that should be here but aren’t” (21), another ghost arises: the secondary, haunting sorrow of not truly knowing what—or whom—one lost. The speaker, in one poem, laments, “My mother won’t tell me if heatstroke killed my brother or the sweating gorgeous twinks who looked but never found” (18), and in another, “my god I miss the elders I have never known” (50). It is the silence around these lives—the kind that attempts to erase them from cultural and familial memory—that propels this collection to do the opposite. In “Eulogy,” brief, fragmented lines evoke pebbles of memories one might fish up from the past, in which the speaker asserts of their brother:

there may be
a world
in which
your name
is never
again
spoken
but that
is not
this world (22).

With this refusal, the speaker thrusts themselves into the unknown—which through the collection turns from an unsettling void to one of generative possibility and transformation. Similar to how the speaker in “BLOODSHIFT”—an intensely bold, orgasmic poem that explodes open the book’s second section—declares, “WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN CHANGES / UNDER WATER” (35), this collection manages to turn the speaker’s “precious / sinking / grief” (23) into something that—to draw from the book’s final poem—the wind truly does catch.

To arrive there, Youngblood Gregory plays with elements of speculative fiction. She uses these elements not simply as a means to probe the unknowable, but to reveal the truth of the present and cast it open to change. While speculation originates from the imagination, this collection demonstrates its power to reveal reality. In “If you ask me why I read science fiction,” Youngblood Gregory writes, “The answer is that there is no such thing as fiction / there are just worlds / as bad as this one” (75). So when “One Million Dead Men: An Empirical Investigation Into New Sodom,” the intriguing, central poem in the collection, details a professor giving a controversial lecture on a government conspiracy to kidnap the gay male population and resettle them on the moon, the effect is a startling illustration of how gay communities served as collateral in the clash of social, economic, and political forces in America.

But beyond issuing clarity, Youngblood Gregory’s speculation wedges alive a gap for new modes/registers/dreams of resistance. For instance, to transform illness “into a weapon”—a response that Youngblood Gregory credits via Amy Berkowitz to the Socialist Patients’ Collective, a German activist group that identified capitalism as “the root of all illness” (41). Indeed, the voices and memory of ill and queer elders—such as Mark Lowe Fisher, Duane Kearns Puryear, and David Wojnarowicz—echo throughout these pages, which seem to weave together an ancestral chorus of resisters who used their illness to disrupt oppressive power structures and make room for the possibility of other worlds.

Following this tradition, the men in “One Million Dead Men: An Empirical Investigation Into New Sodom”—ill, exiled, and resettled from Earth manage to elude their assigned fate to “fuck themselves to death” (57), or at least the official documentation of it. The subversion of their exile into disappearance from the gaze of formal power structures provides a freedom more expansive—for who could surveil the universe?—than anyone could have imagined. But this possibility was imagined, and that is perhaps the heart of DEAD BOYS IN SPACE: queer resistance as carving hidden paths to liberation.

The book’s series of GRID poems is a striking example of this. The acronym GRID, which stands for “Gay-related Immune Deficiency Syndrome,” the former name of AIDS that dangerously conflated gay communities as sources of disease, offers an unexpected poetic form in the shape of a grid. These grids evoke confinement and taxonomic-like arrangements, with each box containing fragments of conversation, lists, and references. Here is the second poem of the series.

The content and shape of these grid poems reflect the sense of dismemberment—of self, communities, relationships—that queer people must often contend with, as well as hypervisibility and scrutiny that we are often subject to. But as generations of queer elders have long done, this collection takes these fragments and makes them fly. The collection’s concluding poems, “Though they thought we were caged, we were actually sewing” (82) and “O and the wind truly does catch,” (85) makes one see these GRID poems differently: not as cages, but as quilts—specifically the AIDS quilt, an immense, weighty memorial (it is estimated to weigh around 54 tons) to lives lost to the illness. Despite its pieces being the size of a “standard grave,” Youngblood Gregory writes that the quilt itself is not a “funeral shroud” but rather is something more buoyant, a messenger that lifts off and takes with it “the weight of all those lives” (83), its launch into the atmosphere signaling both a farewell and the start of some great journey.

In this way, Youngblood Gregory’s poems climb and eventually soar, from documenting the intimacies and griefs of queer life to finding new visions of miraculous, ancestral unknowns on the moon. DEAD BOYS IN SPACE is perhaps a reminder to welcome the gaps and enter them, and find that what most terrifies us can also be the very thing that will free us.

Marisa Lin is a writer and daughter of immigrants. Their work is published in Poetry South, Porter House Review, Cimarron Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series. DREAM ELEVATOR, their debut chapbook, was published by Kernpunkt Press (2024).

I Remember Her
Natalie Clifford Barney, translated by Suzanne Stroh
Headmistress Press, 2025, 132 pages
$30.00

Reviewed by Rhea Rollmann

This year marks the 150th birthday of one of history’s most iconic Sapphists.

Natalie Clifford Barney may have had the misfortune of being born in the United States, but once she came into her multi-million inheritance at the age of twenty-six, she settled permanently in her preferred home of Paris, where she had already lived off and on for much of her youth. There, she set out to accomplish her goal “to make my life itself into a poem,” pursuing a series of Sapphic affairs that would make an L Word scriptwriter blush. At the same time she put her inherited fortune to good use, supporting the lifestyles and art of a whole coterie of other lesbian and queer writers, artists, and poets.

Turn-of-the-century France, and Paris in particular, was preferred by Sapphists for a reason. Barney herself described it as “the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please.” As Jean Chalon put it in his hagiographic biography of Barney based on interviews conducted toward the end of her life:

The Americans of the thirties were still prudes for whom Natalie was the personification of sin. Natalie had understood this perfectly when at the end of the last century she had left her country, where, despite her fortune, she would always have been a pariah, a Sappho of Washington. (Portrait of a Seductress: The World of Natalie Barney, 1977).

Unfortunately, hurling herself into Parisian literary life meant most of her written work was also produced in French, and shockingly little has been translated into English. Happily, a new collection of her poetry has appeared in English translation. I Remember Her, translated by Suzanne Stroh, is a must for fans of Sapphic poetry and history alike, valuable as much for its extensive essay on Barney’s life (including new research) as for the beauty and rhythm of the translated prose poems.

I Remember Her was composed as part of Barney’s effort to woo back her former lover, Renée Vivien. Vivien was a poetess of British origin living in Paris, whose real name was Pauline Tarn. The two had separated after a tumultuous two-year romance, driven apart as much by Barney’s polyamorous lifestyle (she valued her autonomy and, while a fiercely loyal friend to her various lovers, refused to remain exclusively bound to any of them), as by the early death of their mutual friend Violet Shilitto. Violet was an unrequited love of Vivien’s who introduced her to Barney, and after her death, Vivien was wracked by guilt over a feeling of having neglected their friendship while in the throes of romance. Vivien left Barney and eventually wound up in the arms of another. Barney, normally the one being pursued by her various lovers, undertook a number of attempts at winning her back over the next couple of years, including hiring a professional opera singer to serenade her outside her window. The ongoing campaign did not, of course, prevent Barney from pursuing an array of other affairs at the same time.

Barney finally succeeded in getting through to Vivien through a series of elaborate ploys, which included composing and dedicating the poetry collection I Remember Her (and traveling across Europe to surprise her with it). The poems, which form a rough narrative discernible to those familiar with the two protagonists and their histories, stand beautifully on their own. In the earliest verses of the collection, full of reminiscence about the early days of Vivien and Barney’s romance, we find a beautiful testimony to lesbian love, certain to leave the reader swooning. The darker, more complex poems toward the middle of the collection—rooted in episodes of Barney’s personal history, as translator Suzanne Stroh explains—will appeal to the gothic reader of any persuasion. The collection ends on melancholic notes of passion and pathos.

While Barney was highly regarded by the intellectuals and literati of her era, she is not well remembered today. Despite not having achieved lasting fame as a writer, she certainly accomplished her stated goal of making her own life a poem. And she was integral to the literary scene of which she was a part, inspiring other writers through gifts of love and money alike. Yet her under-appreciated writing possesses its own beauty. Her autobiographical work can be sparse and to-the-point in the manner of the best memoir and reportage writers, but she also possesses an ability to turn out breathtaking lines of prose. Rather than try to turn these into poetry, she often preferred to publish them as collections of epigrams, a literary quality on display in many of the poems in this collection as well. The most moving poems are those depicting the early stages of two women falling in love.

The collection is invaluable as a contribution to the shockingly sparse collection of Barney’s writing in English translation, but it’s equally valuable for the extensive essay on Barney’s life appended to the collection by Stroh (the essay takes up about a third of the book’s 115 pages). Stroh surveys the existing English-language literature by and about Barney, and offers a beautiful précis of Barney’s early life, focusing primarily on her torrid, protracted and ultimately doomed relationship with Vivien. Vivien, wracked by illness in part due to her extensive drug and alcohol use, died in 1909 at the age of thirty-two. Stroh explores the complex twists and turns of their relationship, which is riveting in its own right. But far from serving merely as a lurid glimpse into Parisian sapphistry, the essay is also immensely helpful in unpacking the subtle meanings of the poetry.

I initially wondered why the explanatory text was not situated at the front of the book, so as to equip the reader with a deeper understanding of the context prior to reading the poems. But the more I thought about it, the more I approved of Stroh’s choice. Entering into the poem without too much biographical context forces the reader to experience and appreciate it on its own, savouring the construction of phrase and use of language, along with the delicate and erotic imagery, and without reading any deeper, more precise historical meaning into it. Sometimes the mind—as well as the heart—needs to encounter a poem on its own terms, to more fully lose oneself in the miasma of images and feelings it evokes. The historical essay then provides a gratifying digestif, cooling the reader’s passions in the wake of Barney’s heady, heartfelt prose. Stroh deserves immense credit for her dedication in bringing Barney’s life and work to the attention of a new generation.

150 years after her birth, more than fifty years after her death (she lived to the age of ninety-five, embarking on her final romantic liaison in her eighties with a woman nearly three decades younger), Barney continues to compel. What draws us to her? In her 1988 study of Barney and Vivien’s relationship and writing, The Amazon and the Page, Karla Jay wrote that “Barney and Vivien felt that their work had to be lived in order to be valid” and undoubtedly this interface of poetry with lived experience is one feature that elevated the seductive quality of their writing and wooed readers then as now. On a surface level, Barney appears to be the archetype of the original sapphic heartbreaker, drifting from one remarkable romance to another, transported atop a rich bed of early-twentieth-century poetry and art. Barney was a passionate and articulate champion of Sapphic life. She was more than a heartbreaker: she thought deeply and wrote about the nature of friendship and loyalty, both of which she valued and practiced exceedingly well. Those who merely see her as a wealthy, sexually adventurous patron of the arts miss her most important qualities as a writer, a thinker, a philosopher, and a theorist who did not merely write and appreciate poetry, but lived and breathed it in the truest sense. She was a modern woman decades ahead of her time; one who possessed all the troubling faults of any rich person (for instance an inability to see beyond her bubble of privilege), yet one who also carved a courageous and unapologetic path for contemporary queer lives. I Remember Her is an excellent starting point for those interested in studying this remarkable woman, a muse and an inspiration to generations of artists. Stroh’s translation and accompanying essay is a worthy and overdue tribute for this Amazon of love and letters.

Rhea Rollmann is an award-winning journalist, writer, and audio producer based in Canada. She’s the author of A Queer History of Newfoundland (Engen Books, 2023) and has an extensive background in queer, trans, and labour activism.

First Love: Essays on Friendship
Lilly Dancyger
The Dial Press, 2024, 224 pages
$30.00

Reviewed by Leslie Lopez

“To nurture and care for another person, to provide them with tenderness and emotional shelter from the world that mostly doesn’t give a shit about them. To love so fiercely and with such unrestraint that the recipient of that love feels sustained by it, and never feels fully alone in the world. This is what my closest friends give to me, and what I try to give to them” (138).

Lilly Dancyger’s First Love: Essays on Friendship is an honoring of female friendship and the ways these relationships become early sites of platonic intimacy.

Dancyger opens this collection by sharing that her cousin, Sabina, was her first love. From being children who created new words to describe their love for each other to spending time together at different points in their adolescence, each anecdote shows the connection between them remaining strong despite the physical distance and circumstances of life. It’s not a surprise that Dancyger comes to see friendship as synonymous with vulnerability, deep love, and belonging.

But First Love is also about grief. When Sabina is brutally murdered a few weeks shy of her twenty-first birthday, it’s the powerful friendships Dancyger has cultivated that keep her treading above water. These relationships are the basis for the fifteen essays, each one providing an additional cultural layer or personal memory that moves the collection along.

In “The Fire Escape,” Dancyger recounts living with her friend in a crammed East Village apartment. She goes on to describe how the rusted metal perch outside their kitchen window became a space for the friends to connect over cigarettes and alcohol, even after Sabina’s death. She goes on to say of her friends, “Not one of them tried to persuade me to come inside, and for that I loved them more than ever” (108). Thus, the fire escape provided Dancyger the freedom to grieve, exist, and be cared for in a time of tremendous pain.

Dancyger’s writing about friendship also includes a discussion of her fractured relationship with her mother and her indecision about becoming a parent. In “Mutual Mothering,” she shares, “What I do know is that when I imagine what kind of mother I would be, it’s the kind of friend I’ve been that allows me to see it clearly, and to believe I’d do it well” (161). It’s this honesty and unabashed importance of platonic relationships that feels refreshing, especially in a culture that puts romantic relationships on a pedestal and sells the narrative that traditional family is the only real source of care.

Reading First Love served as a reminder that grief can also be an exploration of what it means to have loved, been loved, and continue loving in a world as simultaneously scary and joyous as ours.

Leslie Lopez (she/they) is a Dallas-born, Chicago-based writer pursuing a Master’s of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She can often be found crocheting (badly), laughing (loudly), and reviewing books on her Instagram, @anotherlesbrarian.

Missing Sam
Thrity Umrigar
Algonquin Books, 2026, 320 pages
$29.00

Reviewed by Kara L. Zajac

Missing Sam is a deeply moving story about the multifaceted depths of loss and the rebuilding of strength in relationships during recovery. In this gripping, suspenseful novel, Umrigar sheds light on moving past the trivial nuances that stagnate our lives, like going to bed angry, navigating the gender bias of traditional families, or trying to survive the bitter, spiteful criticism of social media as a queer, brown, Muslim in a supposedly liberal, open-minded suburb in Ohio.

After a fight the night before, Sam goes on a morning run all alone, leaving her wife, Ali, and her phone at home. When Sam doesn’t return home after several hours, Ali is unsure if Sam is trying to get even or if something terrible has happened. Thinking she must wait 48 hours before reporting her wife missing, Ali makes a few mistakes before going to the police, who ask why she waited so long. I can understand why she would want to delete the anger-fueled texts, those hurtful words spat back and forth that led to Sam sleeping in the guest bedroom the night before she disappeared. Fighting with your spouse could definitely appear incriminating in a missing persons case. Soon after, a grad student inappropriately obsessed with Sam oversteps boundaries with social media posts, and newspaper articles imply Ali could be doing more to aid the safe return of her wife, turning the local opinion against her. The media’s scrutiny is bringing the town’s Islamophobia, as well as their homophobia, bubbling to the surface as they criticize Ali’s every move and her intentions as an Indian-Muslim in the U.S., even canceling pending contracts with her interior design firm. Suddenly, Ali feels like a suspect and is caught defending herself when she should be trying to locate her wife.

In this untypical, don’t-know-what-you-have-until-it’s-gone story, we experience the power of forgiveness as Ali reaches out to both of their estranged families.

We will fight, we will make mistakes, we will say angry things to one another. But then as mysteriously as a flower blooming from a seed, as impossibly miraculous as an earth covered with flowers, we will find our way back to one another, we will recognize that we are both stranded in our own histories, that the only antidote for our difficult past is to double down on love, and we will forgive (303)

Using the strength of family bonds to get through the most difficult of times and learning that the unrelenting capacity to love doesn’t always mean forgetting, but understanding each other’s differences and choosing to love anyway, we see the character’s humanness grow with the story. “I’ve wasted all these years trying to change Ali, when all along, the only person I could’ve changed lived within me” (304). With relatable, yet flawed characters, the reader has no choice but to root for them. Umrigar’s lyrical, yet fast-paced writing will leave you wanting more, staying up later than your bedtime because you just can’t put it down. Missing Sam is a great, thought-provoking, heart-string-tugging read perfect for book clubs.

Kara Zajac is the author of The Significance of Curly Hair: A Loving Memoir of Life and Loss, which won the 2025 IPPY Silver Medal for Inspirational Nonfiction and was chosen for “The Best Books We Read in 2024” by the Independent Book Review. Its follow-up, The Special Recipe for Making Babies, was a finalist in 2022’s Charlotte Lit/ Lit South Awards for Nonfiction. Kara’s work has been published in Bay Area Reporter, Lesbian.com, Voraka Magazine, Story Circle Anthology, and Imperfect Life Magazine. She can be found at www.KaraZajac.com