A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories
Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell
Hogarth, 2024, 272 pages
$28.00

Reviewed by Ruby Stefanucci

Mariana Enríquez, renowned for her 2021 International Booker Prize shortlisted work The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, haunts readers once more in her collection A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories. The twelve short stories, primarily set in Argentina, follow the horrors and lives of predominantly women narrators. Echoing themes of her previous work, Enríquez revisits sexism, illness, class inequality, gentrification, and mental and physical ruin throughout the text in a post-pandemic setting. A Sunny Place for Shady People is built on the language of mythology, as myth is explained and entangled in her stories.

In the collection, Enríquez tears womanhood apart; she inspects the ugly insides and confronts us with the pieces of what’s left. Her elements of horror are drawn from the dark and undesirable intricacies of humanity and femininity—the parts of ourselves we hide and shy away from. Her depictions of abandonment, absence, and women in isolation swiftly manifest into horror. She portrays scenes of disbelief, in which a woman’s intuition is diminished, and scenes of transformation, as when women are metamorphosed against their will in “Night Birds” or mutilate themselves for freedom in “Metamorphosis.” Enríquez explores women’s consciousness and experiences, as we witness them grapple with understanding themselves and the horrors to which they succumb.

Enríquez’s narrators are not perfect victims nor martyrs. Her characters live in worlds on the brink of collapse, built on colonialism, sexism, and paranoia. The beauty of Enríquez’s text lies in the unravelling of these forces and the authentic imperfections of her characters.

A Sunny Place for Shady People provokes visceral reactions through the stories’ building tension and direct, striking imagery. Her story “Refrigerator Cemetery” (one of her less grotesque works) exhibits horror in the images of countless abandoned refrigerators and naïve protagonists.

Enríquez’s final, most insidious story closes the collection cyclically, as “Black Eyes” showcases a rejection of the supernatural, as opposed to its invitation in the first story, “My Sad Dead.” Enríquez prompts readers to question how horror might dominate our lives if we let it in.

Ruby Stefanucci (she/her) is currently based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, Australia. She recently completed her undergraduate study double majoring in English and Classics, and was a fall 2024 intern with Sinister Wisdom. Ruby is a lover, writer, artist, and poet, but mainly just a girl in the world.

Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down?
Allison Blevins
Persea Books, 2024, 70 pages
$17.00

Reviewed by Pelaya Arapakis

Allison Blevins’s award-winning book Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? is a lyrical meditation on the effects of chronic illness, disability, and a spouse’s gender transition as experienced through the prism of a marriage. Following the daily lives of its central characters—Grim and Sergeant—Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? contemplates what it means to exist in a body among other bodies. Blevins’s hybrid narrative-in-vignettes defies conformity to a single genre, pushing and pulling between fragmented prose-poetry, fairytale, and auto-fiction, guiding us through difficult and deeply layered emotional terrains that are profound and heart-wrenching.

Masks figure prominently in Blevins’s work as a device to explore the multiplicity of identity. This thematic concern is first implied in the very epigraph of the text: “Under this mask another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces” (Claude Cahun). Soon after, we are introduced to Grim and Sergeant—personae of Blevins and her partner, respectively—as they navigate the world in bodies and identities that are in various states of flux. However, change is often accompanied by grief, and we bear witness to Grim, who mourns for the person she once was, the person she was before her illness, before “every moment [was] an accounting of pain” (61). Throughout this process, it becomes clear that identity is neither static nor singular, that “Grim is a character played by the woman she once was” (38). Here, identity is itself a mask—but not necessarily one that, when removed, unveils a definitive truth, but is instead a perpetual unfurling.

Throughout the narrative, Grim’s body is often rendered as a site of pain. Daily tasks become gruelling, “Grim tells the doctor, I want to stand long enough to make grilled cheese, want to walk the dark living room at night to check the children are breathing” (18). Still, Blevins speaks to the grounding force of the body. While “Grim often finds herself lost. . . Her body remains,” with its needs, desires, its state of simply being, binding her—binding us— to others: “we are not held together but bound to each other” (10). Grim is reminded of this visceral nature of embodiment in a medical waiting room, of “how we all do this strange moving together as marionettes. Like smelling armpits or ear wax or maybe dead skin squeezed from a tight black pore. Like remembering the weight of a past lover on your body. Like breaking apart or sewing together” (7). Yet, sometimes our needs conflict with those of people around us, and it is this very tension that Blevins captures with incredible nuance and poignancy. In a quarrel with the Sergeant, Grim asks what he needs, to which he responds, “I need you to need less from me” (41). Just as pain might course through Grim’s body, the quiet fracture of this confession reverberates throughout these pages.

Swirling between genres, Blevins weaves a gripping portrait of a marriage that is as devastating as it is tender. As the title suggests, Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? reminds us that embodiment is shared, messy, and ineluctable, and that our bodies—with all the joys, aches, and complexities they bring—are our ultimate homes, even as they collapse around us.

Pelaya Arapakis (she/her) is a musician, arts worker, and freelance writer based in Naarm/Melbourne.

The Unboxing of a Black Girl
Angela Shanté
Page Street YA, 2024, 160 pages
$18.99

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

Angela Shanté’s new poetry collection is subtitled “A Love Letter to Black Girls.” In these powerful poems, she confronts “Black Girls vs. The World.” She writes: “I want to live in a world where Black girls get to be free” (9). In the poet’s introduction, she confesses that “Poetry and experimental storytelling have always anchored me when the rainbow truly wasn’t enough,” paraphrasing the title of by Ntozake Shange’s 1975 play, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Shanté claims that she wrote the book that she always wanted to read—a book to be read out loud—full of choreopoems vivid in their articulation and poetic outcry.

The poet evokes an American history that has always exploited and abused Black people. The salve poured into the wounds suffered by Black women is found in their respect for inheritance, tradition, and legacy. She credits her own admiration for the elders who molded and shaped her during her childhood years as key to her survival. Her relationship with her mother and with her older sister, who assumed the maternal role when their mother was missing, became vital to the “unboxing” of Angela Shanté.

The poet writes of the “boxes,” or labels, used to define and classify Black people, especially ingrained into the psychology of young Black girls. In her poem “Floss (Verb),” she introduces the verb “to floss,” which means “to flaunt” in her own language. Through this word, she describes the economic boundaries that existed between herself, her sister, and the other children in the neighborhood whom she was told to call “the poor”:

“Having luxuries placed you in a tier above. I knew that if I had something I could flaunt over another person, the world would treat me a little nicer. Hold me a little gentler. So, allowance was a big get. It meant my big sister and I were a pair of the very few girls in our hood who had money to spend. Having extra was a big floss” (18).

The poet reveals that “some boxes are chosen for us” with the defined, restrictive, and established roles Black girls are forced to play by their family members who instill in them certain codes of behavior and language. Other “boxes” become part of the wider, even more insidious influence of false socialization caused by racial differences, economic stratification, and prejudice.

As I reviewed this poetry collection, I was drawn to the philosophy of James Baldwin in Begin Again—Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.’s series of timely essays on the life and works of the novelist and social critic. I began to consider the process of “unboxing” the self that Shanté describes in her poems. There are obvious similarities between this process of “unboxing” and the personal transformation Baldwin experienced through his work. Professor Glaude writes:

“Imagine as a child grappling with the hurtful words that say you’re ugly, he (Baldwin) intimates to Fern Marja Eckman, his first biographer. ‘You take your estimate of yourself from what the world says about you. I was always told that I was ugly. My father told me that. And everybody else. But mostly my father. So I believed it. Naturally. Until today I believed it’” (35).

The mission of Shanté’s work is to lay claim to and reinforce the beauty found in the Black family, in the Black body and mind, and within the landscapes of the neighborhoods in which we dwell. She writes in the poem, “The South Bronx”: “between the grime and litter / over burned buildings / and through smoke-filled highways / i can make out beauty” (79). This exemplifies the recurring theme of her poems, that there is inherent beauty in the lives of Black people that cannot be stifled, maligned, nor ignored. She convinces readers that we all need to step out of our boxes.

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program at Goddard College, she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar. She has published three poetry collections as well as two chapbooks of poetry. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Atlanta Review, Callaloo, Calyx, Chiron Review, Seneca Review, Tuskegee Review, World Literature Today, and many other literary and scholarly journals.

Loving Corrections
adrienne maree brown
AK Press, 2024, 200 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

Loving Corrections is adrienne maree brown’s most relational book yet, exploring how communities can get “specific, and deeper, when we have accumulated the wisdom to challenge harmful norms of privilege and power” (4). brown wants us all to retain a curious posture in the face of diverse people and problems. Readers are invited to confront uncomfortable truths about their own biases—and how to confront others’—in the name of a love for our collective future.

brown did not write Loving Corrections to police activists, reprimanding them for not believing the right things or living out their solidarity in a specific way—in fact, brown’s essays rarely contain explicit political positions that may divide her audience. Instead, there is an entire chapter titled, “Righting Solidarity: Flocking Together.” She wisely shares that “confusion is a colonial tactic,” meaning that a lack of community between oppressed groups creates dissociation from intersectional issues that could be reconciled with a robust solidarity (85). Relationships come first in activism, brown believes, and it is the work of the activist to flock “with the people,” not to be in a position of power that confuses or fractures groups (92, italics brown’s).

In the chapter “Love Looks Like Accountability,” brown dives deep into how our personal relationships can have a ripple effect on how our society functions. In a digital world where “therapy speak” is often used incorrectly or in harmful ways, this chapter is a wonderful refresher on how we can love ourselves and others through the right ways of engaging in relationships. brown quotes Prentis Hemphill: “boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously” (153). brown writes about how we must be responsible for our internal state and how it might impact others, how we must apologize and receive apologies, and how to know when it is best to let a relationship go. These feel like simple emotional teachings we learn in elementary school, but later in life, our capitalist system does not reward this loving behavior. Starting small with improving love in everyday relationships will create a more accountable and loving society.

In the conclusion to Loving Corrections, brown reveals that this is the last time she will write specifically for those “active in movements for social and environmental change” (189). This does not mean her work, nor ours, is close to finished. Loving Corrections is the sixth book that brown has written in the Emergent Strategy Series—which contains thirteen books in total—and oh boy, what a comprehensive and necessary series it is. These books are gentle yet mighty tools for activists and their communities. Loving Corrections affirms that, always, “there is love at the center” (7).

Courtney Heidorn (she/they) is an Assistant Editor for Chestnut Review and holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Azusa Pacific University. You can see more of their work in their chapbook, Palimpsest, from Bottlecap Press and in CURIOUS Magazine and Pearl Press. Find them on Instagram and Substack @palimpsestpoems.

To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers
Edited by Rae Garringer
The University Press of Kentucky, 2025, 112 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Home is a complicated thing. For many queer folks from Appalachia, home is too often a place longed for, but which we know will never quite fully have us. This collection captures that tension well, and importantly amplifies the voices of Black, Indigenous, and other marginalised peoples in the collection of essays and poetry. Living in spaces that don’t always love you back means that too many queer people move through the world braced for violence.

The collection gets right into the gut punch of what survival looks like with “What You Should Know Before You Kill Me” by Brandon Sun Eagle Jent (2-3). Jent writes, “This body is but a wave in the ocean of me,” (2) an assertion that queer existence is something larger than the physical body, and not easily erased. Rayna Momen’s “They Say All Kinds Are Welcome Here” lays bare the reality for so many, particularly people of colour in these spaces: “yet these [country] roads to prosperity / are full of [shit] potholes and bigotry” (4). The collection definitely doesn’t ease you in—you understand the nuances of the author’s lived experience before you finish the first essay.

Lucien Darjeun Meadows continues the conversation, “And I can never ‘go home,’ not really, not completely, ever again” (12). So, the work presents a question to the reader: Where exactly do you go and what do you do when home is both a longing and a loss? What I left with is that it’s up to us to carve out a space and fight for a place to be. I understand that this should inspire in some ways, but reading this during the current political climate in the United States left me feeling a little disheartened at the reality that we’ll seemingly always have to fight just to be.

Every piece in the collection speaks to those questions of longing and belonging. hermelinda cortés writes about being Mexican-American in a space that doesn’t “claim” her and her choice to stay, rooted by something deeper than belonging in a traditional sense. Likewise, Momen’s “Growing up Black in Appalachia / made me want to fight and to flee / left me internalized and empowered / to live a double life / like Affrilachians learn to do” (26) echoes the complexity of existence as a marginalized person in Appalachia. Garringer also acknowledges the difficulty in addressing these questions of identity and belonging: “This, too, is a part of the place I call home. And not talking about these horrific truths is a way of protecting them, condoning them, even” (46).

It’s hard not to feel sad reading the collection, but there are also lovely moments of love and hope—not naive hope—but the kind that we struggle for and progress towards, even if it still feels disheartening to fight for it constantly. Rosenthal’s segment, “A Queer Place Called Home” (63-70) was the most comforting read in the work. It offered a glimpse of a future for queer life and love in Appalachia. I suppose the collection answers the questions the authors raise by showing that home might not necessarily be someplace to return to, but instead something to create. D. Stump writes, “We find meaning in all the places meaning calls to us. We find home in all the places that invite us to sit at the table and eat” (82).

In the final pages, Jent returns, telling readers that “this world loves me too” (83-84). I finished To Belong Here feeling exhausted and a little sad, but mostly grateful for the book and the voices it holds—an undeniable proof that we’re here, creating and continuing.

Allison Quinlan now feels more conflicted about missing home. They are a nonprofit manager and teacher currently living in Scotland (originally from rural Georgia, United States).

Reflections in a Rearview Mirror
Teya Schaffer
2025, 54 pages
$10.95

Reviewed by Judith Katz

Teya Schaffer’s short volume of prose and poetry begins with a piece called “Appreciations.” It’s a conversation between an unnamed narrator and a street woman she calls Valerie—aka the “dog lady”—that takes place as the two sit on a curb in San Francisco circa 1970 or 1980. As the two talk companionably about the Free Clinic, women’s land, and animal rights, they are interrupted not once but twice by a man who aggressively approaches and insults them, excoriating the narrator for her masculine appearance. Her friend Valerie ignores the man. Our narrator takes Valerie’s lead, and the man eventually goes away.

I read “Appreciations” decades ago in a journal called Common Lives/Lesbian Lives in issue number seven, Spring 1983 (65-68). It struck me then, as it strikes me now, as a vivid picture of that San Francisco street life. But it also strikes me as a vivid reminder that attacks—verbal and physical—on our queer bodies are not anything new.

Other stories in this slim collection explore difficult and important relationships. “A Letter to San Francisco” is a painful correspondence between a woman who finds her lesbian footing in San Francisco and her closeted, married lover, originally published in Sinister Wisdom: 31 Winter 1987 (67-71). “With Love, Lena” is an aging Holocaust survivor’s reminiscence of her secret lover in New York City on the occasion of her death. It is a powerful story about survival in all of its forms, and though it was first published in Sinister Wisdom: 29/30 The Tribe of Dina, A Jewish Women’s Anthology (157-158) last century, it still is as powerful today.

The poems and stories in Reflections in a Rearview Mirror talk about illness, motherhood, and widowhood—all within the framework of what it means to be an out lesbian—in the late 1900s and now, in the early 2000s. They are frank, powerful, and moving reminders—a kind of historical document but also a road map of what it still means to be a lesbian, a mother, an ex-lover, a widow, and a wife, even now, in this perilous and treacherous time.

Judith Katz is the author of two novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, which won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She is currently working on sequels to both novels and is still meditating on her novel in a drawer, The Atomic Age.

Season of Eclipse
Terry Wolverton
Bella Books, 2024, 292 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Lucy Soth

I couldn’t put down Season of Eclipse by Terry Wolverton. In the novel, a famous author witnesses a terrorist act and must go into hiding. She finds herself fighting for her life against a vast and powerful conspiracy. While drawn in by the novel’s suspense and page-turning intrigue, I came away appreciating its quieter and more complex questions of identity and personal fulfillment.

Marielle Wing is a fifty-one-year-old author who pours herself into her work. While she has reached heights in her career, she lacks fulfillment in her personal life. We meet her disappointed, returning from a conference after losing a book award and engaging in a meaningless, self-destructive tryst with a much younger woman. At the airport, she witnesses an explosion and photographs the alleged perpetrators. Taking photos may seem an odd, detached choice in the wake of a near-death experience, and Marielle’s choices occasionally seem improbable. However, we soon realize that Marielle’s experience of life is fundamentally disconnected. She is overly preoccupied with her looks and her writing talents and very concerned with her public image. She lives in self-imposed isolation, with only her ex-girlfriend’s cat as a close companion. The narration is critical of Marielle, foregrounding her faults with biting clarity.

Soon after the attack, an FBI agent visits Marielle and informs her that she must enter witness protection to ensure her safety. Her death is announced to the public, and she is forced to assume a new identity as a humble Midwestern school teacher named Lorraine Kaminsky. Marielle must contend with the death of her public persona and the loss of everything that made her exceptional. This is an interesting premise in itself, in which a famous egoist must adopt an anonymous and ordinary life, and the strength of the novel lies in Marielle’s internal narrative during this rupture. Her vanity, impulsivity, and ego fight against the life-or-death demand of anonymity. Her flaws are deeply human. Most sympathetic is her unfulfilled need for connection—an open wound that she seems unable to acknowledge fully. Marielle is as multifaceted and realistic as she is occasionally frustrating. Unable to accept her circumstances, she fantasizes about her splashy return to public life. But her humdrum existence doesn’t stay ordinary for long, as she’s soon faced with new threats against her life—and still others against her legacy, as her publishers announce the pending release of a posthumous novel, one that Marielle didn’t write.

Marielle is not an immediately likeable character, and that’s what makes her growth so compelling. Over the course of the novel, she can only ensure her survival by letting go of every aspect of her identity. As readers, we bear witness to her metamorphosis, in which her exposure to grave danger forces her to become a new person, one who must accept vulnerability, who must trust and depend upon others, and who can finally be open to true connection.

Lucy Soth is a writer, researcher, and dog walker based in Washington, D.C. In her free time, she makes lampshades and undertakes ambitious beading projects.

Swagger: A Celebration of the Butch Experience
Curated by Rae Theodore and edited by Nat Burns
Flashpoint Publications, 2024, 174 pages
$16.95

“And think about / How much I love / Butches / And the people / Who love them”

(“Butch 4 Butch,” Beck Guerra Carter, 72).

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Swagger is a celebration and an exploration of the identity, history, and community of butch lesbians. Whether you identify as butch or simply want to understand butchness in its multifaceted glory, this work offers great insight and connection. The work begins with artwork such as “Gender” by Ash, and unfolds into retellings and stories from elder butches and poetry that captures the spirit of butch existence. One of the earlier sections written by Merril Mushroom—a name familiar to many Sinister Wisdom readers—announces the book’s intention to define, complicate, and joyfully celebrate butchness, beginning with a non-rigid definition of ‘butch.’ Her words set the tone for the rest of the compilation of voices adding to the conversation on being butch, and reminding readers that defining butchness can be both simple and complex.

The book continually grapples with key questions: What does it mean to be butch? How do we see, define, or know it within ourselves? The explorations in Swagger are as varied as the individuals writing them, but every work has some exploration of these questions, and many presented answers! Georgie Orion lets us know that butches can be anyone—“Lesbians from Girl Scouts. Lesbians from camp. Lesbians from church. Lesbians from school. Basically every grown-up lesbian I had ever met. And they all showed up” (21). Understandings of the intersection between community and the celebration of a shared, comfortable, normalized identity were present all through the work. In addition to descriptions of building a shared community, the topic of self-creation features in several pieces.

The question of masculinity and the boundaries of emulation versus reclamation, which I have always considered a distinctly butch expression, is a recurrent theme. Virginia Black writes,

“While I have emulated men and masculine presentation, I have never wanted to be one, nor felt the need to defend my space as a lesbian against a man…unless he was trying to manspread on public transportation, so I did it first to prove a point. How straight men perceive me doesn’t shape my self-definition” (26).

Cindy Rizzo’s “City Butch” grapples with the insecurities that accompany socially constructed butch stereotypes and reaffirms the confidence to define oneself. She writes, “How far could I stray from a stereotype so I could be true to myself?. . . I knew in spite of everything that I was a butch” (28). The answer to the questions of identity definition and constructed lines aren’t explicit, but several pieces set out that identity can be self-determined and fluid. Virginia Black closes their work by noting the possibility inherent to her self-determination of butchness. How should she define herself and her butchness? They write, “Exhale. / However I want” (27).

Swagger honors the vibrant past of butchness while embracing the ever-evolving diversity of butch identity (and ever-evolving understanding of butch identity). Several authors in the collection touch on trans identity and butchness, which is important in a collection like Swagger. As Audre Lorde writes, “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives” (Sister Outsider, 138). Transphobic rhetoric persists, even in queer communities, erasing the contributions of the people at the forefront of the fight for liberation. Transness is celebrated in this work, too. Swagger sets up a conversation to challenge misconceptions that masculine presentation determines gender or that gender identity and gender performance are inherently the same. The collection also makes it clear that socially drawn lines can become tools of resistance and experimentation.

Finally, I loved reading the authors’ biographies at the end of the work, not only because it gave me insight into the identities of the people creating but also because it provided information on connecting. If you couldn’t tell from my earlier havering on community and connection, I consider it a vital aspect of the queer community, so it was lovely to find these incredible people compiled at the end of the work. Swagger embodies queer community and connection in a really beautiful way. Every butch joyfully existing is evidence of a queer future, so I’ll leave you with Victoria Anne Darling’s rallying words, “Don’t, don’t, don’t / Tone it down” (33).

Allison Quinlan (they/she) volunteers as a copyeditor for Sinister Wisdom and manages a non-profit in the UK that supports survivors of abuse. They’re exceptionally bad at keeping lavender plants alive. . . one could say they’ve become a lavender menace.

The Weird Sister Collection: Writing at the Intersections of Feminism, Literature, and Pop Culture
Edited by Marisa Crawford
Feminist Press, 2024, 264 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Gabe Tejada

With the resurgence of books, largely due to readers on social media, an integral part of the literary ecosystem seems to have been neglected: the literary magazine. The Weird Sister Collection—a book edited by Marisa Crawford—is a timely homage to that particular species of the literary and art magazine: the blog.

The collection begins with a foreword by Michelle Tea, dyke queen of the countercultural 1990s lesbian literary scene. Tea writes, “Something that had felt so private and obscure to me had also been found and claimed by others” (xii), a feeling I’m sure was shared by each one of us upon discovering Sinister Wisdom, whether in its inception back in 1976 or doom-stumbling onto its Instagram account in 2024. Here, as in the Weird Sister book and blog, we write about “(our) feminist history, (our) places in the past, and the feminism we’re all making right now” (xii). Lovers of literary magazines will feel at home in the eclectic—yet cohesive—mix of art critique, politically engaged personal (or personally engaged political) narratives, and cultural commentary found in this collection. Though divided into seven thematic categories, including “Talking Back to the Canon,” “Double, Double Pop Culture Trouble,” and “Performance, Identity, and Public Space,” each piece fuses high and low art as well as popular and obscure cultural references to capture the feminist millennial milieu of its writers.

Sam Cohen’s “I am Jenny Schecter, Please Love Me” was a vindication, not just for Jenny, but for all the LAGs (lesbians after graduation) like her. How after a certain age, the certainty of one’s queer identity is expected, with those still dis/uncovering their queerness seen to be lagging behind. “We Were There: Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter at the New Museum” by Hossannah Asuncion was an institutional critique through “the care of the (Black woman’s) body” (200). In naming all of the artists involved, through their text Asuncion extends the reclamation of cultural space that is often denied Black women artists—a continuation of the care underpinning the collective’s actions. Similarly, Megan Milks’ piece on Barbara Grier’s pseudonyms also contends with (literary) space. At the same time that they acknowledge Grier’s contributions to lesbian literature, Milks points out how Grier’s plethora of pseudonyms led to her monopolization of lesbian/queer space. On the other hand, Soleil Ho’s piece—also involving a nom de plume—is a searing reminder of the pitfalls of tokenistic diversity and inclusion. The title, “Yi-Fen Chou and the Man Who Wore Her,” shows how easily our marginalizations can be appropriated and weaponized against us, echoing the long history of the white man’s abuse of our bodies.

The Weird Sister Collection is an eclectic concoction of essays and narratives. Inside its pages, feminist and queer readers and activists will find writing that will both comfort and challenge them.

Gabe Tejada is an emerging arts writer and student based in Naarm.

A Map of My Want
Faylita Hicks
Haymarket Books, 2024, 94 pages
$17.00

Reviewed by Dot Persica

During my very first very long lesbian relationship, I gifted my then-girlfriend a copy of The Essential June Jordan. In it, I wrote something along the lines of “this book is mine which means it’s yours which means it’s ours.” This year, I got it back neatly packed in a big cardboard ramen box with (some of) my clothes, my old DS, and some other books. Which means it is now mine alone. As is my copy of A Map of My Want, by Faylita Hicks.

“I blinked and we were in love—
then out of love—

then child-shaped again—then not.
Then both of us alone. Together.
The both of us crying into the empty
of our kitchen sinks.

Jesus—how did we
get here, again?”

(Hicks, “BONFIRE BRIDES,” 29).

June Jordan’s work first taught me that poetry could be something else entirely, beyond rhymes and form, that the idea that one might have to sacrifice content for form is entirely false. June Jordan taught me to see poetry as a weapon.

Reading Faylita Hicks, I held June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Emily Dickinson close, as tools to better comprehend what I was interacting with. Lorde and Dickinson are quoted in the book, along with a variety of other writers—Jordan and Giovanni are voices I heard echoing through some of the pages even without them being named. It is their irreverence that I found again in Hicks’ work.

Readers are immediately pulled into Hicks’ world: there is no time for pleasantries, the urgency of Hicks’ voice and the vivid descriptions of images, smells, textures, and specific scenarios create an inescapable sensory trip from the very start. The book is divided in four sections: ALCHEMY, LIFE, LIBERTY, and THE PURSUIT. The omnipresence of the erotic is palpable throughout the book, with the erotic being a natural phenomenon:

“Staring out into this abyss of bush I counted

millions of solar flares, each of them fingering
the ultraviolet of evening, a tinted mimosa

pressing its silk mouth to my swollen knees”

(Hicks, “CHIRON’S BEACH,” 9).

Hicks writes unabashedly about sex and gender, explicit without shame, “What if I was heavy between the legs? What would it feel like to hang my body from a machine—to feel the trickle of time between my skin and shift?” (Hicks, “STEEL HORSES,” 5).

“Who I am now—a kind of boi traveling south//southwest: as far as the stars will
take me

into the land coughing up all of my names, the skin of the road warm (...)”

(Hicks, “ON BECOMING A BRIDGE FOR THE BINARY,” 6).

Parallels are drawn between nature and the body, where one is a metaphor for the other, because they are ultimately the same; borders, frontiers, jails: attempts to contain a body that is meant to be free. Similarly, life and death are also companions who give and take from each other.

Natural disasters are very present in this collection, since Hicks is from California and central Texas, and frequently draws from their experience. Storms and fires are both metaphor and reality, both political and personal—one of the biggest manifestations of the damage done by capitalism, and especially interesting because they don’t discriminate. While the most exploited countries and populations are the ones paying the price of Western climate terrorism, eventually these disasters will catch up with their perpetrators and not even the richest among us will be spared.

Protest in all forms is also an all-encompassing theme, and on these pages the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Sandra Bland appear, sparking deeper analyses about America’s constant attempts to disappear Black life, be it by murder, imprisonment, or both. Hicks writes about their life during and after their captivity in the Hays County Jail, and the mental toll of imprisonment.

“For weeks, I forget what the sun felt like.
I forget I was once loved. I forget affection”

(Hicks, “RELEASE||RELEASE,” 58).

One truly cannot imagine what it means to be imprisoned in America if one has not lived it, and Hicks’ courageous voice forces readers to look right when they would rather close their eyes. It is necessary to see these evils if we are to eradicate them.

Hicks’ work is furiously loving, filled to the brim with hope for their communities, their comrades, their friends, their loved ones, love of their latinidad, love for revolution.

“my city is a river
of college students destined to be
swallowed by the rural expanse
of the Guadalupe.

En protesta, we comrades float
outside of the federal building,
—the county jail where I was buried—
En la lucha! against
the waves of the recently shipped,
the waves of the soon to be drowned,
and the waves of white faces swimming
happily in and out of the front doors”

(Hicks, “DO NOT CALL US BY OUR DEAD NAMES: A DOCUPOEM,” 60).

Hicks unites nature, sex, protest, race, gender, justice, and remembrance in this collection, which will speak to anyone who feels strongly about freedom in its many definitions.

Dot Persica (any pronouns) is a lesbian performer born in Naples, Italy. They are a classically trained soprano with some dance training; they have experience directing opera, helping out on film sets, and doing stand-up. They are a cofounder of the italian lesbian+ collective STRASAFFICA* with which they have organized community events, raised funds, published zines and created beautiful bonds. They also write poetry, like all lesbians.