I Hope This Helps
Samiya Bashir
Nightboat Books, 2025, 144 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

Seven years after Field Theories—Samiya Bashir’s third poetry collection which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award for Poetry—comes her recent work in I Hope This Helps. Bashir’s work, both individual and collective, has been published, printed, and performed across America and abroad. Samiya Bashir is a poet, librettist, performer, and multimedia artist. Her honors include a Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Regional Arts and Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, and two Michigan Hopwood Poetry Awards. She currently serves as the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University.

Bashir has edited magazines and anthologies of literature and visual arts. In 2002, she cofounded Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBTQ+ writers of African descent. Also, she served as an executive director of Lambda Literary from 2022 to 2023 where her mission was to elevate the work of LGBTQ+ writers, affirm the value of their stories, and advocate for queer and trans writers.

I Hope This Helps explores the metamorphosis of the artist despite the despair brought on by isolation and the limits of our social realities: time, money, work, and widespread global crises. Her poems raise the question: “What can it mean to thrive in the world as it is?” Both within and extending beyond traditional academic settings, Bashir’s work creates, employs, and teaches a restorative poetics, turning her moments of painful experience into triumphs of witness, healing, and change. Her meditation reveals her vulnerable inner life and how she has evolved into an artist.

Bashir knew at the age of eight that she wanted to become a writer. She taught herself how to read early and started keeping a journal. Both of her parents were public school teachers. She was encouraged by her grandfather’s nephew, who was a journalist, to begin writing. Other early influences on her work were hearing June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights” in 1991 and 1992, and the murder of Rodney King.

Subsequently, Bashir learned the importance of community among writers. She has said about the writer’s life: “If there's any utility to being a poet. . . it’s our job. To help people articulate what’s happening. And know they're not alone in the articulating of it.”

To Bashir, “The poem itself is something alive—not just existing on the page.” Bashir has invested time in the theater and her operas and installations have traveled throughout the country. “Awareness,” she says, “is the chief motivation to art. You can be distracted and miss it. We’re taught to be distracted.” We have been distracted from attention to the fates of certain populations. “When you’re talking to people of color you must have to acknowledge trauma.”

In I Hope This Helps, Bashir’s work benefits from her well-rounded artistic perspective. Her poems thrive in the form of typographies, cartographies, musical scores, and photographs (e.g. the poems “Negro Being” and “Freakish Beauty,” (102-103). Other poems in the collection draw on Bashir’s lifelong practice of journaling. The poem “Letter from Exile” highlights her sojourn in Rome after winning a coveted prize:

“I am still, in theory, one of two 2019-20 Rome Prize Fellows in Literature. The year marked the 125th anniversary of the American Academy in Rome: a rare two-poet year. Bold and brilliant Nicole Sealey holds the second prize.”

“We are, together, the Academy’s first Black women Literature Fellows. Ever. Being a Negro First™ just feels so last century” (50).

This prose poem startles the reader with its insistence that the poet’s stay in Rome under the auspices of the prize, during the pandemic, was a form of exile, an expatriate experience both physical and intellectual.

Of the Italian language she writes in the poem/journal:

“The Venetian etymology of ciao is one of enslavement. Whether coming or going one said schiavo: I am your slave. This was, I guess, in case someone forgot” (53).

And of her return to the States she writes:

“Most days America screams to anyone who’ll listen how it hates me so much it would rather kill us all than let me live” (55).

The poet Erica Hunt has written of this new collection: “What do we do to live and thrive—as Black people, joyous and queer, new neighbors and strangers, our full humanity—dwarfed in the shadows by towers of power, distraction, and fear? Bashir’s poetry leans into these questions using her superpower—pausing to listen—over-hearing and hearing over—‘hearing’ under and rewriting, reinscribing her Journey—through the ‘twinkle textured disco ball Jenga set’—and shows the reader how creative power fuels us to begin again. And again.”

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. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in many literary and scholarly journals.

Lesbian Styles in Cinema
Vicki Karaminas and Judith Beyer
Edinburgh University Press, 2025, 192 pages
$120.00

Reviewed by Atlanta Tsiaoukkas

Looking at the countless publications on queer cinema and costume, it is surprising that until this year a comprehensive survey of the lesbian aesthetic in cinema had not manifested, and, as such, Vicki Karaminas’ and Judith Beyer’s Lesbian Styles in Cinema offers a timely investigation of lesbian cinema and queer fashion history. Working across a vast array of films from the 1929 German silent Pandora’s Box (Pabst) to last year’s Love Lies Bleeding (Glass), Karaminas and Beyer examine style on screen as a gateway through which to explore expressions of ‘lesbian subjectivity,’ ultimately concluding that contemporary cinema, with its loosened grip on gender binaries, increasingly troubles the established conventions of lesbian style.

Moving through lesbian film history, the sheer number of films included in this relatively short volume is both impressive and perhaps overambitious—some films receive a level of passing attention that may disappoint, and few receive the extensive critical analysis that, when executed, offers the work’s most exciting insights. Lesbian Styles in Cinema begins with coming-of-age narratives, particularly examining masculinity and femininity in lesbian cinema. Chapter two moves on to stories of seduction, continuing the theme of masculinity as a distinctly visible expression of lesbian style. Chapters three and four turn to biopics and period dramas, though the line between these is a fine one that is not drawn out sufficiently to justify separating the chapters into two. The subsequent chapter on crime thrillers is undoubtedly the most expansive, especially where the styling of queer femme fatales speaks to a lesbian visual pleasure. Chapter six focuses on the central implication of Karaminas’ and Beyer’s argument, that contemporary lesbian cinema, such as Bottoms (Seligman) and Drive-Away Dolls (Coen), disintegrates the butch-femme dichotomy in favour of androgyny.

The generic approach taken in Lesbian Styles in Cinema limits the efficaciousness of Karaminas’ and Beyer’s narratives, obscuring their most stimulating observations. The sporadic discussions of colour, for example, across films such as Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche), Blue Jean (Oakley) and Vita & Virginia (Button), suggest a pattern that would have benefited from extended thematic analysis rather than passing references across various chapters. The same could be said of discussions on school uniform, where the analysis of Collete’s uniform in both reality and the biopic would have made most sense alongside the first chapter’s exploration of Olivia (Audry) and Mädchen in Uniform (Sagan)—a missed opportunity to compare and contrast the uniform as a lesbian style symbol. My hope is that scholars notice the patterns laid out by Karaminas and Beyer and take the initiative to explore them further.

The ostensible aim of Lesbian Styles in Cinema is to demonstrate how “film uses lesbian style to construct characters that appeal to lesbian, queer and mainstream audiences in studio films and independent cinema” (5). Such a distinction would have benefited from greater extrapolation, as would Karaminas’ and Beyer’s preference for lesbian over other more inclusive terms such as sapphic or queer, in light of the fact that many of the characters featured in the text’s ‘lesbian cinema’ do not explicitly identify as such. Similarly, the project of lesbian style in cinema would have been bolstered by a more comprehensive understanding of the oft-repeated descriptor, androgynous, which is applied broadly and unevenly throughout the analysis. Whilst definitional disputes and gender spectrum discourse may be tedious at times in academic literature, a greater level of specificity when discussing concepts such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘androgynous’ may have brought more nuance into the discussion of lesbian cinema and style.

While Lesbian Styles in Cinema would have benefited from a narrower focus that attended more closely to the theoretical issues of gender expression and lesbian identities, this timely intervention is undoubtedly a boon for the study of lesbian and sapphic identity and style in cinema. Karaminas and Beyer have effectively demonstrated the richness of lesbian cinema and its scope ripe for further investigation of the nebulous yet distinctive lesbian style.

Atlanta Tsiaoukkas is a UK-based writer and researcher currently working towards a PhD on queer Victorian schoolgirls and their homoerotic friendships. Find her on Instagram @aatlanta_aa

Living at Night
Mariana Romo-Carmona
Spinsters Ink, 1997, 257 pages
$8.00 (used)

Reviewed by Mel Oliver

Living at Night brings us into the intimate and brutal world of Erica García, a young, working-class Puerto Rican lesbian navigating life in a white, suburban Connecticut institution. Through clear, honest prose, the novel exposes the violence of care systems, where patients are heavily sedated—their bodies regulated and recorded with cold precision—yet remain defiantly human. Erica’s role as a worker within this system reveals not just the cruelty of institutional control but also the ways women of color survive, adapt, and quietly resist within oppressive structures. Though Erica cannot save everyone, she comes to a pivotal understanding: she can reclaim her own life.

This story deeply resonated with me, as two of my aunties spent decades working in hospice and state-run institutions similar to the one described in the novel. Their labor—quiet, often invisible, and profoundly gendered—carries emotional weight and historical silence. Reading about Erica felt like reading about them, and I couldn’t help but wonder what liberation they might have imagined for themselves had they encountered this book, not just in terms of sexuality, but in terms of self-worth, bodily autonomy, and the possibility of a life beyond survival. One of my aunts, a Christian lesbian, has endured abuse in both heterosexual and same-gender relationships. I see now how she may have clung to her work not just out of duty, but in search of the care she herself was denied, perhaps imagining that love and tenderness might be found in the act of caregiving. My other aunt, who left an abusive marriage and retired from institutional work, may have found a rare form of agency and control in that setting, something the rest of her life never offered.

I grieve the silence between them, the solitude they endured. If only they had known their shared pain could be a bridge, not a wall. This novel is more than fiction—it is a mirror for the generations of women who have labored, loved, and lost in silence. It invites us to imagine what liberation might look like for the caregivers, not just the cared-for. And it insists that working-class women, especially queer women of color, deserve stories that reflect their complexity, their courage, and their right to be seen.

Mel Oliver is a Black Indian (Choctaw heritage with Munsee roots), environmental educator, poet, researcher, and lover of crafts, dogs/dingos, and music! https://melsorbit.carrd.co/

Lowest Common Denominator
Pirkko Saisio, translated by Mia Spangenberg
Two Lines Press, 2024, 312 pages
$23.00

Reviewed by Jules Gellert

Lowest Common Denominator is a fictionalized memoir from the well-known Finnish lesbian author and actor, Pirkko Saisio. As part of her Helsinki trilogy, Saisio tells the story of her early childhood as the only child of communist parents in the years following World War II, as well as the Winter and Continuation Wars between Finland and the Soviet Union. Through the eyes of the young narrator, readers see her confusion in trying to understand the adults around her and concepts such as religion, gender, and class. The story also jumps to the narrator in the present day, which follows her as she copes with her father’s death. This book functions like a stream of memories, bouncing between the past and present and different views of the self. Saisio explores her self-image through her character in the novel, playing with the first- and third-person points of view, almost as a voyeur to her own thoughts and memories.

Translated by Mia Spangenberg, Lowest Common Denominator is written beautifully and fluidly. Though the pace is slow and sometimes contains anecdotes that I did not find particularly useful or interesting, the book overall uniquely captures the narrator’s childhood and its connections to her adult life. The original title of the book, Pienin yhteinen jaettava, literally translated as “smallest common factor,” might better represent the young narrator’s experiences as a foundation for her adult self, depicted as a more conventional—though lesbian—woman and mother. Saisio discusses gender and sexuality through her childhood gaze, from her learning about Jesus, who “isn’t a man or a woman” (p. 200), to her devotion to Miss Lunova, an announcer at the amusement park. Despite the lack of a more explicit exploration and focus on gender and sexuality, for readers interested in a very personal book about childhood amid political crises and a slowly changing culture—especially regarding the status of women—it is definitely worth the read. Though the book is approachable, I recommend doing a quick read on the political climate of this time period in Finland to better understand the driving forces behind the story.

Jules Gellert is currently a master’s student in Helsinki and a Sinister Wisdom intern for the summer of 2025. She spends her time reading, studying, and making art.

Hungerstone
Kat Dunn
Zando, 2025, 336 pages
$28.00

Reviewed by Sydney Minor

“What is a monster but a creature of agency?” (237). This is the central question posed by Kat Dunn’s Hungerstone. A retelling of the 1872 lesbian vampire novella Carmilla, Dunn’s novel takes the gothic and sapphic essence of the original and expands it into a fully-fledged, well-rounded work that draws the reader in with its elegant prose and brooding atmosphere.

The novel follows Lenore, an aristocratic woman burdened by past tragedy and discontent in her present life and marriage. When she travels north, to Sheffield, to prepare her husband’s manor for a hunting party, she encounters a mysterious woman named Carmilla, who has suffered a carriage accident. As their relationship deepens, Carmilla challenges Lenore to confront what she truly desires—and demands that she pursue it. The further Lenore falls under Carmilla’s spell, the more the border between agency and monstrosity blurs, leaving the reader to ponder what is right and wrong in the case of revenge, liberation, and forbidden love.

Dunn skillfully explores the dichotomy between fear and desire, using the constrained agency of Victorian women as a lens through which to examine sapphic longing. Lenore’s character wants more in life; she wants to have more power than presiding over houses, staff, and guests, but she also feels a longing that is deeper, more personal, and more taboo. The novel includes questions of repression, identity, and whether reclaiming control over one’s life—especially as a woman in a patriarchal world—can ever be free from violence.

At times, the novel suffers from over-explanation, particularly concerning Lenore’s backstory and how it informs her current behavior. The occasional flashbacks often feel out of place, not adding much to the story and occasionally interrupting the narrative momentum. Additionally, the supporting characters can feel one-dimensional, serving more as props than participants. However, this also allows Carmilla’s seductive and enigmatic presence to stand out as a true highlight, drawing the reader in just as she draws Lenore in.

Rich in atmosphere and emotional complexity, the novel oozes with darkness, longing, and seduction, making Hungerstone a worthy and haunting successor to the Carmilla story.

Sydney Minor (she/her) is a New York-born, London-based writer and musician interning with Sinister Wisdom. She recently completed her undergraduate studies at the Royal College of Music and will begin a master’s in musicology at Cambridge University this autumn, with a focus on the intersection of queer studies and twentieth-century opera.

Queer Communion: Religion in Appalachia
Edited by Davis Shoulders
University Press of Kentucky, 2025, 168 pages
$19.95

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him” (James Baldwin, 1962).

From the start, this collection makes clear a shared experience of being harmed by the people we love the most, in the name of God and love, and the complications that arise when you continue to love the people who seem to swing between loving you and hating you. Each work in the compilation wrestles with what it means to have faith, both in God and the people around us, beginning with, “effectively all rural queer Appalachians and Southerners have loved people who hated them—or at least parts of them, parts that can’t be divided out” (x). While Queer Communion leans more into a positive connection with faith, it doesn’t shy away from harm either; it just shows ways in which people have re-shaped or found a different way of worship, which I appreciated.

The collection reiterates the idea of making one’s religion in nearly every segment, piecing together queerness with Appalachian identity, religious views (from Catholicism to strict protestant evangelicalism), and how this “holiness” exists apart from exclusionary beliefs. Davis Shoulders writes, “I attend a church of my own making. At any place where a sense of knowing is felt” (128). And Jarred Johnson says, “Faith seems like it should be life-transforming, not a set of strictures by which to abide” (118). Savannah Sipple defines love and holiness well, writing:

There are moments in our lives when we know we’re confident in the person we are, in the things we know to be true about ourselves. . . What would my grandmother say about this granddaughter of hers who now has a wife, who now has a love whose arms open wide enough to call me home? I’d like to think she’d call that holy (13).

I agree that faith is about finding a place of honesty, where one can be fully themselves. Julie Rae Powers calls queerness “spiritual in its own right” (21). The theme of queer acceptance is constant in the collection; for example, John Golden’s piece begins by discussing baptism as a moment of queer acceptance, which I appreciated for its beautiful symbolism.

Golden’s work took an interesting turn, though, when they told a story about arguing with a right-wing man, and in a moment of anger, told him he’s removed from the grace of God. Later, they expressed regret, and I was a bit conflicted. Hateful people tell queer folks all the time that God condemns them. Why should this hateful guy get mercy? I suppose it’s complicated. Golden’s piece forces you to sit with the question of whether anyone gets to say who’s beyond redemption.

Conflict is part of what makes the collection so wonderful, though, because it’s honest and, in many cases, doesn’t tie everything up neatly. It recognises the pain of religion, deep and complicated that it is. Some of the essays lean into faith and find peace in it, while others walk away from it entirely. The collection makes space for both. Mack Rogers’ piece offers insight into how a faith that emphasises control and worship, conditional love, and operates as a tool for manipulation can impact us. Then, it compares this religious control with defining one’s own joy. Emma Cieslik sums up the conflict well, writing, “many queer people like myself feel the same urgency of ‘choice’ or being pushed to ‘decide’ between living as their authentic selves and drinking the Kool-Aid of the church” (45).

I finished the work with the takeaway that each author had built something sacred for themselves, even in spaces where they were told they didn’t belong. Shoulders describes the struggle of situating Appalachian identity given others’ exclusionary beliefs, saying, “They’ve imagined it to be a place where a person like me shouldn’t belong” (132). And yet every author has dispelled aspects of those imaginings. Appalachia is and always has been a space where everyone belongs; the people who hate don’t get to define God, the land, and who is welcome, no matter how hard they might try.

Allison Quinlan is a nonprofit manager in Scotland, originally from the rural southern United States.

Sunburn
Chloe Michelle Howarth
Verve Books, 2023, 288 pages
$16.99

Reviewed by Jules Gellert

Sunburn is a coming-of-age story set in 1990s rural Ireland, following Lucy as she faces her love for her friend Susannah over the course of several years. The catalyst of her infatuation is spending time with Susannah the summer before their final year of school, a summer spent sunbathing in the yard of Susannah’s absent parents’ home. By the end of the summer, the two girls are unable to deny their interest in each other. They begin a secret relationship that slowly deteriorates as they prepare for the rest of their lives.

When Lucy’s mother catches the girls together, Lucy begins to publicly date her best friend, Martin, to prove to her mother that she is “moving in the right direction” (229). Lucy finds herself forced down the same pipeline her mother and every other woman she knows has gone through. She must choose whether to follow the well-trodden path of domesticity in order to preserve the conditional love of her mother, friends, and community, or to follow her love for Susannah.

While Sunburn covers topics perhaps overdone within the queer coming-of-age genre, such as the role of religion and guilt in self-acceptance, Howarth dives much deeper both through her excellent writing and her discussion of the impact of shame on those outside the individual experiencing it. In making her choices between Susannah and Martin, or her own happiness and the path set before her, Lucy wounds everyone around her. She tries to walk a tightrope between these options, but by trying to make everyone happy and avoid pain and rejection, she becomes selfish. Howarth explores these ideas through a perfect combination of tender, intense, and occasionally unsettling inner dialogue. Lucy’s love for Susannah is not sappy, but all-consuming and incredibly honest. For some readers, this may be a bit off-putting—but for many, it will make the story more sincere and profound.

Lucy’s story requires patience, like that which a good friend offers. Following her story is painful and frustrating, but also deeply moving. As a reader, you might struggle with the characters in their questions such as: what is love worth and worth losing? Sunburn is a distinctive story about choices, shame, and love, perhaps best summarized by Susannah in a letter to Lucy: “I’ll marry you if you get past all the shame of being with me” (98). Despite the young age of its characters, this book is mature and good for anyone who wants to experience the overwhelming intensity and honesty of a first love.

Jules Gellert is a master’s student in Helsinki and is a Sinister Wisdom intern for the summer of 2025. She spends her time reading, studying, and making art.

Be Gay, Do Crime
Edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley
Dzanc Books, 2025, 203 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Ash Lev

Be Gay, Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Queer Chaos is the second anthology by editors Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley, a follow-up to Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women. The sixteen queer-authored short stories of Be Gay, Do Crime are less concerned with getting bogged down in the details of the law and more interested in exploring the catharsis, necessity, and queerness of rule-breaking. As someone who’s not a big reader of typical crime or heist novels, this struck the perfect balance for me. From stealing dogs and drugs to shooting politicians, every morally objectionable act performed by these characters offers an unexpected thrill, echoing the sentiment of the John Waters quote in the book’s early pages, “You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book” (v).

I was hooked from the title alone, immediately recognizing the phrase from its frequent use in online queer circles. The sentiment is an important reminder, especially at a point in time when queer and trans existence is increasingly criminalized, that the law was not made with our safety or wellbeing in mind. With its equally delightful title and cover, Be Gay, Do Crime is a celebration of a new generation of queer anarchism. As Myriam Lacroix writes in the opening story, “The Meaning of Life,” “They loved breaking the rules in the name of their love, and they especially liked getting away with it” (7).

“It’s a Cruel World For Empaths Like Us” by Soula Emmanuel is told entirely in second-person perspective—almost as if to challenge John Waters’ earlier quote—and forces readers to walk a mile in the criminal protagonist’s pinching, too-tight shoes. The story opens with a jolt of pain as “you,” an unnamed trans woman, undergo a round of laser hair removal. The treatment intended to ease the distress of gender dysphoria only worsens it when it leaves behind a painfully obvious facial rash. When you are dismissed by a customer service representative after expressing concern about said rash, you decide to retaliate. Your weapon of choice? Hoax threats.

So near and so far, it is, so nothing and yet so everything, so diminutive and yet so responsible for a small but significant portion of your problems. You endeavor to deepen your voice, in the hope that it will give you a kind of ambient authority, although it’s been so long that you can barely do it without sounding like you are doing a bad impression of yourself. You find the phone number and you dial, careful first to turn off the caller ID.
But you don’t complain (26).

In another case of dysphoria-driven crime, Aurora Mattia’s “Wild and Blue” tells the story of Peach and Sandy, who are on the run with a stolen vial of Dysphorable™. This fictional hallucinogenic drug was manufactured by a private pharmaceutical company with the intent of mass market distribution, but had not yet received FDA approval. Desperate, dysphoric, and drunk in love, the couple use the drug carelessly, and soon learn the consequences.

[Peach] was a woman. It was so simple. She was a woman because she was in love. It could be enough. One day it could be enough because she was a woman and it didn’t matter if Sandy was a man or a woman or some kind of secret thing. She was Sandy’s woman and it was enough (110).

Among its many strengths, Be Gay, Do Crime succeeds in portraying trans people not as sad, helpless victims, but as relatable, resourceful, rightfully angry, and ready to fight back.

Ash Lev is a butch writer and media artist currently living in Tkaronto. In Ash’s free time, you’ll find him kissing his cat’s head, overanalyzing TV shows, or contemplating grad school.

Daughters of Chaos
Jen Fawkes
The Overlook Press, 2024, 288 pages
$27.00

Reviewed by Martha Miller

Jen Fawkes is an award-winning author with a literary style that is at times lavish and stunning. I particularly enjoyed her periodic aphorisms reminiscent of Oscar Wilde.

For the most part, Daughters of Chaos is an epistolary novel told from multiple first-person perspectives of a set of twins, Silas and Sylvie. The narratives include their childhood and letters from their teen years onward. A major part of the story is about the Civil War, during 1862, and looking back on the events from 1877. The book is multilayered, while the story is advanced in sequence from the beginning to the end of Sylvie’s life. Historical figures are interspersed with fiction. The tale is more than simply a story of letters—it also includes encyclopedia entries, a translated play, news articles, and more. It synthesizes history, myth, and sheer invention, incorporating stories along with periodic jumps into ancient Greek drama. For me, these additional layers made the novel harder to follow. Nonetheless, the writing is engaging and well-crafted.

The story starts with the twins’ pregnant, unwed mother, Brigitte, and their tinkering, unavailable father. As children, they are abandoned by their mother and older sister and left alone with their father. While we see them from childhood, the lion’s share of the book takes place in Silas’ and Sylvie’s young adulthood. After the father’s death, Silvie’s brother leaves her, and we hear from him in letters which contain stories of his Confederate adventures in submarine construction and maintenance. Close to adulthood, Sylvie runs away to Nashville in search of her sister, Marina. There, she joins a Ladies Aid Society, a Union spy’s secret society of magical women disguised as prostitutes, secretly supporting the Union cause. These public women are all part of an ancient cult dedicated to trouble-making and the worship of Chaos. They work together toward a golden era of female sovereignty. Sylvie is tasked with translating the final, lost comedy of Aristophanes, and with the help of a dozen Priestesses of Chaos, works on it daily from the time she arrives in Nashville.

In an especially interesting section, we are told that real prostitutes nearly defeated the Union army due to syphilis. The authorities in Nashville recognize this prostitution problem and decide to round up all of these women and ship them elsewhere to rid Nashville of the disease. The prostitutes are put on a ship, and in a long, grueling trip, go from one port to the next, rejected each time until, unbathed, dehydrated, hungry, and some dead from suicide, they return to Nashville, where new laws are made to make prostitution legal. Working women are licensed and must have physicals that render them clean of disease. Early on, Sylvie tells us, “The fact that you’ve never seen something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” This sets up the reader for the speculative nature of the novel. Incredibly, we encounter a creature like Ray Bradbury’s Fog Horn, with silver scales, who is Silvie’s long-lost sister.

My problem with this novel is the scattershot structure. I wish I could tell you the whole thing comes together like a puzzle, but if so, I didn’t see it. The novel weaves together Greek mythology, Civil War history, sisterhood, fire, sex, and love. There are layers of text, journal entries, letters, narratives, play performances, as well as side stories told by other women. One in particular that will stick in my mind is about a woman who wants to murder her daughter because, despite appearances, she believes the girl isn’t hers. The father stops his wife several times and finally kills her. Then, because he loves her and couldn’t live without her, he kills himself. However, these bits and pieces take the reader in and out of the narrative.

While some lesbian attraction develops, only at the end does it come to fruition. The bewitching Hannah and Sylvie eventually ride off together toward California, into the sunset, one might say, where Sylvie gives birth to twins. Silvie puts the scraps of her life together in a book, and she also, like her sister, becomes a leviathan. In the end, we find Sylvie ready to teach her daughters how to belong to themselves.

Martha Miller is a retired English professor and a Midwestern writer whose books include fiction, creative nonfiction, anthologies, and mysteries. Her nine books were published by traditional, but small, women’s presses. She’s published several reviews, articles, and short stories and won several academic and literary awards. For more detailed information, her website is https://www.marthamiller.net/. Her Wikipedia page is here. She lives in ‘The Land of Lincoln’ with her wife, two unruly dogs, and two spoiled and sleepy cats.

Letters to Forget: Poems
Kelly Caldwell
Knopf, 2024, 112 pages
$24.00

Reviewed by Lya Hennel

I previously reviewed Your Dazzling Death by Cass Donish, a beautiful poetry collection and elegy to the author’s partner, Kelly Caldwell. Also a poet, Kelly was a trans writer and visual artist living with bipolar. This review is of her debut poetry collection, published after her death. A lot of these poems are addressed to Cass as letters. Letters to Forget is a companion book to Your Dazzling Death. The two works can be read separately and are both incredible on their own. But they complete and answer one another painfully, yet beautifully.

The collection is divided into three parts: Firstly, “Promise Light or Tomorrow” opens with apocalypse—an ending as a beginning. Half of the collection is composed of poems titled “[house of]” where “house” might be the body along with the grief. The other half is addressed to Kelly’s partner, Cass, and the poems are all titled “[dear c.” In these titles, the bracket never closes, as if every letter meant for Cass is endless and beyond rules: “[dear c. Please, don’t mind me, I’m standing facing the wall, trying to pay off a debt’’ (24). Kelly conveys her struggles with mental illness: the depressive episodes, the high-intensity emotions, and the empty, heavy hopelessness. “[dear c. Will you kindly care for my garden / until I return? It is spring now. […] I will return” (38) reads like an omen, a request, and a promise at once.

The second part of the collection, “Self-Portrait as Job,” mainly consists of a long-form poem. Across fourteen pages, exquisitely written, the poem features the biblical figure Job, who might be read as similar to Kelly trying to fit in a place she couldn’t find, in a life that felt like a stage play—suffocating and already scripted: “There was a man / Whose name was Job / Who couldn’t uncouple His good fortune / From his guilt” (42). “What you think is a hot plate coil heating red in your mouth / Is the taste of shame / Spit or swallow it / Either way it may take quiet root” (44). Throughout this chapter are feelings of shame, guilt, alienation, and boredom, intertwined with religious themes and seemingly religious trauma. Then, the words repeat like a metronome, in an intoxicating cadence: “It is summer, so there is no rain. The house […] It is half, so there is no whole. The house […] Is never still, is still, is no longer. The house” (45). As one body stumbles out of another / Impersonates a house / In passing” (52). “All of this is about god talk” (57) ends the masterful poem, followed by a poem titled “GOD TALKS.”

Finally, in the third part of the chapter, “Unlearning the Letter,” we return to short-form poems and the lulled repetitions of “[dear c.” and “[house of].” One of my favourite “[dear c.” poems reads: “To cross out is to add. I worry I might become unreal” (79). In this line, crossing out or leaving is a way of adding another chapter to the story, and a way in which the narrator makes a choice rather than following a written script. The poem also includes: “resurrection is a sense of direction […] I never wanted to be a wanderer, […] I plan to suffer greatly at my auctioned introduction into hope. This talent for getting lost requires effort’’ (89).

In many poems, Kelly reminds us of the various shapes death can take. Faced with the unknown, impermanence, and endless possibilities we die, transform, transcend, and experience rebirth, in an infinite cycle. For now, I am here, and if only for a brief moment, it might be enough. Just as when I read Cass Donish’s Your Dazzling Death, I found myself reading each poem again and finding new layers and meaning each time. I will keep coming back to Letters to Forget, as Kelly’s painfully accurate and relatable words convey and provoke intense feelings. This work is a strikingly beautiful collection that I know I will remember.

Lya Hennel (they iel) is a former Sinister Wisdom intern from France based in London, UK. They are passionate about queer multidisciplinary art and literature, poetry, and translating.