Águila: The Vision, Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Two-Spirit Shaman in the Ozark Mountains
María Cristina Moroles and Lauri Umansky
The University of Arkansas Press, 2024, 208 pages
$24.95

Reviewed by Rose Norman

“Always remember that you are proud. You are proud first because you are an Indian; second because you are a Mexican; and last, because you are an American.” With these words, María Cristina Moroles’ father sent her off to first grade in Dallas, Texas, adding this warning: “They are going to say things to you. Do not ever believe them.” Having crossed the border undocumented twenty-seven times, José Moroles knew hardship but did not anticipate just how hard those Dallas schools would be on his oldest daughter, who quickly learned how to fight and not back down.

Raped at twelve, giving birth at thirteen, in foster care and on the Dallas streets thereafter, María Cristina Moroles overcame many obstacles before dying and being reborn as SunHawk in the Ozark mountains. Along the way, she had a conventional marriage to a man and a daughter Jenny whom she kept with her through subsequent adventures (having given up the rapist’s baby for adoption).

Her life took a turn for the better when she left her husband after following a vision from Texas to Fayetteville, Arkansas. There, she worked as a truck driver for an all-woman food co-op near a women’s land collective called Sassafras. Then, a local hepatitis epidemic brought her sick and dying to Sassafras, against her explicit wishes. Sassafras is where she died and was reborn as SunHawk.

SunHawk and another woman of color, Leona Garcia, were only twenty-three when the Sassafras women voted to give them the rugged land on the mountain next to them, 120 rocky acres accessed by an overgrown and deeply rutted logging road. This property would become Arco Iris, Rainbow Land, later Rancho Arco Iris, and finally Santuario Arco Iris, a sanctuary for women and children. Over time, many things changed. Leona left, other women and children came and went, some of them partners, but SunHawk remained. Always living gently and in sympathy with that rugged earth, SunHawk was not in good relation with the Sassafras women or her straight neighbors. She writes, “these mountains have harbored some women’s drama” (75). But she stuck it out, eventually making peace with her “archenemy,” Diana Rivers, who owned the neighboring Sassafras land and wound up giving those 450 acres to the nonprofit land trust that SunHawk had set up for the purpose of sustainability. After that, through another spiritual journey, SunHawk became Águila, or eagle, her shaman name and highest rank as a shamanic healer.

This memoir tells a special story, an important one to be told in these days when the earth and humanity are in great need of healing. It is a complicated story, full of earth magic and visions and healing energy. When I interviewed SunHawk in 2014 for Landykes of the South (Sinister Wisdom 98), our transcribed two-hour phone interview took many drafts to produce a short essay about the Arco Iris story. Lauri Umansky, Águila’s co-author for this book, transcribed fifty hours of interviews followed by years of back-and-forth revision. In an Afterword, Umansky describes the process and does not attempt to name the genre of this first-person memoir. This is not an “as told to” story, and Umansky is no ghostwriter; her name is on the title page, along with Águila’s birth name.

It is an artfully crafted story combining narrative, poetry, and prayers, and including a photo essay about the death and green burial of an old friend who came to Arco Iris hoping to be healed, and ultimately to die.

Above all, it is a story of resilience and healing on women’s land. We have few books about women’s land communities. This is an important one.

Rose Norman is a retired professor of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she co-founded the Women’s Studies program and was its first director. She later chaired the English Department. After retiring, she co-founded the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project and is its general editor.

Women! In! Peril!
Jessie Ren Marshall
Bloomsbury, 2024, 288 pages
$17.99

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

There is something for every reader in Jessie Ren Marshall’s short stories: robot girlfriends, sapphic ballerinas, lesbian co-parents, and women flying through space. Marshall writes in several genres—romance, sci-fi, young adult, and more. Yet, the collection remains unified with exclusively female narrators and the truth that these women are, in fact, in peril. The most memorable perils to note are big tech controlling women’s bodies, divorced women grieving awful men, and pseudo-spiritual sapphic stories.

Stories like “Annie 2” and the titular story “Women! In! Peril!” display Marshall’s commentary on sexism, especially in the context of late-stage capitalism and rapid technological advancements. Annie is a female life-like robot who does housework and, when desired, is a sex toy. She says that robots like her are “not capable of wanting anything for [themselves], other than to be useful and used” (25). Annie is a robot, so this is in her design. However, Annie represents the pigeon-holed patriarchal roles assigned to women. With this in mind, Marshall cleverly gives Annie a bit of humanity—she cares for the other appliances and household items, like cleaning the toaster or shining shoes. Although her human owners control her, Marshall gives Annie agency within her captivity to care for other items destined to be thrown out and forgotten.

Marshall writes several stories that involve divorce, and almost all of them involve the female protagonists finding their way after their marriages end, as well as grappling with the reality that their previous male partners were, in fact, terrible. In “Dogs,” the narrator’s husband leaves her on a whim for one of his clients at his veterinary practice. The story consists of her in the early stages of grief—she can barely shower or leave the house. Marshall employs a dog motif throughout the story, and by the end, the reader realizes that she is likening the ex-husband to a dog. The speaker is going for a drive, and she sees a dog in the road and contemplates rescuing it, but it runs away. She says, “I could turn the car around, take the one I love and try to save him, but I know it wouldn’t work. The dog has made his choice” (99). Her ex-husband has made his choice, and she can do nothing. Marshall’s wit allows her to create metaphors that work well emotionally, but they also successfully take digs at awful men.

There are a few sapphic stories in this collection, and I can only describe them as spiritual—their themes go beyond what is tangible and knowable. In “My Immaculate Girlfriend,” the protagonist’s girlfriend gets pregnant, to both of their surprise, and the girlfriend believes it was God who impregnated her. The story ends with the protagonist’s acceptance of faith and doubles down on her love for her girlfriend: “I would never leave her. I would never let her go” (51). In “Late Girl,” we follow a dance student’s traumatic accident that leaves her with memory loss. However, her body remembers her dance choreography even when her mind is blank. It is revealed that her body remembers more than just dance moves; it also remembers her intimate relations with an unexpected character. When her mind catches up with her body, she does “the most honest thing a body can do. It gave her this mouth, this tummy, these thighs and cheeks and hands” (147). Marshall’s sapphic stories are dreamy, warm, and very well executed.

Each reader will see themselves in Marshall’s impressively nuanced, flawed characters. The diversity in storytelling and genre in Women! In! Peril! is genuinely impressive and very fun to witness. Picking up Women! In! Peril! is a great way to celebrate AAPI voices this month and always.

Courtney Heidorn (she/they) 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 at CURIOUS Magazine and Pearl Press.

Jewcy: Jewish Queer Lesbian Feminisms for the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Marla Brettschneider
SUNY Press, 2024, 173 pages
Hardcover $99; Paperback $31.95

Reviewed by Emily L. Quint Freeman
©May 2024

I always try to read books with an open heart so I can gain new insights, as well as admire the writer’s craft. Just this year, a non-fiction collection of scholarly essays, personal stories, and poetry was released, edited by Marla Brettschneider. This book explores the diverse backgrounds and experiences of being a Jew, queer, and, for some, having a non-traditional gender identity. As a Jewish lesbian, I was particularly interested in this book.

People respond to a book differently based on their background and point of view. So, here is a two-paragraph capsule of me, the reviewer:
My grandparents and great-great grandparents were immigrants on crowded, smelly steamers to New York during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century from central and eastern European countries (known as “Ashkenazi” Jews). If they had not emigrated to America, it is highly likely that I never would have been born, as during the Holocaust, the Nazis and their collaborators murdered 6 million Jews – and roughly 200,000 queers.

I am a Reform Jew, which is one of the branches of Judaism that has adapted traditional Jewish laws and practices to respond to the social/cultural conditions of the modern world. As a lesbian, I would call myself an intellectual butch, attracted over a lifetime only to women. I guess in today’s lingo, I am some shade of non-binary. I had plenty of challenging times when my birth family pulled the financial rug after I would not abandon my “choice” of a lover. Thankfully, within Judaism, I did not have to leave a fundamental part of my identity behind.

The most accessible parts of this book for the non-Jewish reader (and many Jews) would be the personal essays and poetry. I particularly liked a story called “ID Please” by Vinny Calvo Prell about her personal angst about claiming her complex family heritage. Her mother hailed from the Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean, and her father was Ashkenazi Jewish. She grew up with a deep connection with the Jewish community and came out as queer. Only as an adult did she begin to explore her mother’s indigenous heritage. As she became more open with her Jewish friends about her Pacific Islander roots, she started to feel uneasy, even unwelcome. Prell must have been raised in either the Orthodox or Conservative branches of Judaism, which follow Jewish law, deeming people to be Jewish only if their mother was Jewish or if they underwent a conversion. She would have been fully welcome in my synagogue as a Reform Jew. The pain of trying to embrace various aspects of herself was well described, and the story was worth several reads.

Another personal story called “Life on the Borderlands” by A.S. Hakkari discusses her heritage as a trans woman and Mizrahi Jew – meaning her ancestors either lived in the land of Israel or Muslim North Africa/Middle East. Her essay explores the marginalization of her gender and religious identity in a very moving way. Hakkari vividly described how trans women are a target for abuses of many sorts.

Hakkari’s story informs the reader that Jews are not monolithic but have diverse cultures and practices. This fact is due to the “Diaspora,” that is, the expulsion and/or dispersal of Jews by conquerors of the ancient Jewish states of Israel and Judea. An interesting fact to note – forty percent of Israelis are Mizrahi Jews, who were expelled from Muslim Africa or the Middle East after the birth of the Jewish state in 1948. They form a vibrant part of the multi-cultural framework of Israel.

The book contains a memoir segment from a Black Jewish lesbian, Carol Conaway. I wanted to read more of her memoir so I could better understand her experience and path to Judaism. The segment centers on her attraction to urbane white women, particularly “The One,” who would later become her life partner.

The essays in this book tackle ancient Jewish religious texts, seeking to explore different interpretations of what is acceptable. The traditional answer was only cisgender, heterosexual sex. However, “Deconstructing the Binary, or Not” by Sarra Lev provides a learned analysis of early rabbinic literature to postulate an openness for an intersex personal life.

Another entitled “Remembering Sinai” by Sabrina Sojourner is a reconsideration of the book of Exodus, which analyzes ancient Hebrew and the traditional patriarchal image of G-d. The essay “Postmodern Concepts of Sex, Gender and Sexuality in the Framework of the Jewish Lesbian” by Rona B. Matlow seeks to deconstruct the assumption that only cisgender males and cisgender females are acceptable in Judaism. She does this by offering different interpretations of religious texts and commentaries.

These academic essays may prove daunting for non-Jews or Jews who are not familiar with fundamental Jewish texts or the Hebrew language. Another essay entitled “Leslie Feinberg’s Complex Jewish Lesbian Feminism” by the book’s editor did challenge me as the reader due to its language walls based upon leftist dichotomies. As a result, this essay did not accurately portray the complex story of Ashkenazi Jews in America and their acceptance or non-acceptance in non-Jewish society. This is especially important during the present time, given the trauma and pain of the whole Jewish community after the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on October 7, 2023, and the taking of innocent hostages.

The umbrella of self can be difficult to navigate. This book offers ideas and stories of Jewish lesbians seeking acceptance rather than marginalization. It points to a more inclusive world for writers with different family backgrounds and gender identities.

Emily L. Quint Freeman is the author of the memoir, Failure to Appear, Resistance, Identity and Loss (Blue Beacon Books) and numerous creative non-fiction articles appearing in digital magazines including Salon, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Syncopation Literary Review, Open Democracy, The Mindful Word, and Narratively.

Sarah Horner Interviews Dianna Hunter
Dianna Hunter’s Work and Its Ties to Midwestern Lesbian Culture

Sarah Horner: The Midwest is seldom perceived as a place where LGBTQ+ culture is preserved and cultivated, but your work and life prove otherwise. What is it about the Midwest that encouraged you to live, write, and teach here?

Dianna Hunter: The Midwest is a diverse place, with braided histories that include labor and civil rights organizing, farmers’ co-operatives, Indigenous sovereignty, feminist organizations, LGBTQ activism, and more. I grew up in a working-class home in Minot, North Dakota. Mom and Dad were union members, liberals, and DIYers in the 1950s and 1960s. They worked for wages, and they allowed me to be what people now call a “free-range” kid.

Most of my friends free-ranged. We wore jeans, got our hands dirty, and roamed the town on our bikes. Some of us played softball. That’s one place you could find lesbians, even in Minot. We had an Air Force base and missile silos that made us a nuclear target, but Mom chose to warn me about “queers” on a women’s softball team that I admired. She meant to shelter me, but she unknowingly alerted me that some women loved other women—not that I knew what to do with the information back then. Heterosexist programming had most of us mystified.

I didn’t wake to my sapphic identity until college. The expense of sending me to a liberal arts school in Saint Paul stretched my parents’ budget, but they let me go. I found feminism and lesbian identity there. One of my history teachers gave me a copy of the “Redstockings Manifesto,” where I first encountered the concepts of female oppression and male privilege. This set off a progression of discovery. I found the original Amazon Bookstore Co-op in Minneapolis and, along with it, women’s liberation and lesbian writing. I taught a course on feminism as a student and came out in 1971. A friend started the Lesbian Resource Center in Minneapolis the next year, and after trying to farm on women’s land for eleven years, I moved on to graduate school, college teaching, and writing.

Sarah: You have a new novel, Clouded Waters, that follows a journalist searching for a missing environmental scientist while mourning the loss of her wife. How did this project begin?

Dianna: Before the virus arrived, I’d been working on a mystery novel. I had a rough draft, but I wasn’t satisfied with it. When Covid came along, the shutdown gave me time to catch up on my reading. I wanted to know more about an environmental controversy that was (and still is) going on here in northeastern Minnesota. Three companies—all tied to international mining conglomerates—want to mine for copper and nickel. So far, none of them has managed to get through all of the legal and regulatory obstacles, and locals are split between the promise of prosperity and concern for the environment. The ore deposits run through sulfide rock that can leach sulphuric acid and heavy metals into the environment when exposed to water. We’re a wet state, and our watersheds drain to Hudson Bay, the Mississippi River, and the Atlantic by way of Lake Superior. In other words, they drain to the world, so there’s a lot to be concerned about.

I started asking myself, “Why not connect the story to these issues? Why not make the main character the publisher of a small, multi-generational newspaper? Why not make her a mature person, balancing grief for her wife and loneliness for their grown kids against her need to keep that struggling newspaper alive in the age of disinformation and political corruption? Why not have her personal struggle happen at a time when her community is also struggling over this potential new mine? Why not connect the crime to the controversy? Oh, and why not add a little romance to the mystery and have a new woman come to town?” The answers led to the story I tell in Clouded Waters.

Sarah: Clouded Waters features Indigenous and Métis (mixed racial ancestry) characters. Why was it important to you to include them in your book?

Dianna: Clouded Waters makes clear that the place we now call the Mesabi Range of Minnesota was home to the Dakota and Anishinaabe (also known as Ojibwe or Chippewa) before SB’s [SB is Susan B. Ellingson, the protagonist of Clouded Waters] people arrived, but it goes deeper than a land acknowledgement. The characters cross binaries, borders, and bloodlines, and we learn through their stories that people have been doing this for a long, long time.

The Indigenous people have not vanished from this place, and they are still enacting their own personal and cultural histories. SB keeps all of this in mind as she tries to work out her responsibility to her community, the earth, and her deceased Indigiqueer wife’s (Ramona’s) people, including the children she and Ramona raised together. In real life, by federal treaty, the Anishinaabe are guaranteed rights to hunt, fish, and gather across their homelands in northern Minnesota. When environmental degradation threatens to harm water, plants, and wildlife, they have unique legal standing to fight in court for the earth and water, and they have played a major role in holding off multinational mining corporations and oil pipelines.

In Anishinaabe culture, women are traditionally the water protectors. Their work has been spiritual, cultural, political, and effective, and Indigenous people are doing this dangerous work around the world. That’s why, in Clouded Waters, I have Ramona’s mother, Alberta Desjardin, leading a group of water-protecting grandmothers who protest against the environmental dangers posed by the mine. Without her, the story would be incomplete.

Sarah: How have your own experiences with back-to-the-land life influenced your fiction writing, particularly Clouded Waters?

Dianna: As a writer, I’ve been able to draw on my experiences, failures, and successes, and there have been plenty of all three. In my twenties, I lived with other lesbians on farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota. To make ends meet, I got a job working with dairy farmers and often stayed overnight with farm families so that I could collect milk samples at evening and morning milkings. Later, I bought my own dairy farm and worked as a farmer’s advocate, trying to help my neighbors keep their land during the Reagan-era farm crisis. I’ve met a wide variety of people, taken it all in, and used it in my fiction—filtered, transformed, and tied to made-up events through invention and imagination.

In Clouded Waters, I created a mid-sized town like, and yet also unlike, towns that exist on the Mesabi Iron Range. I filled it with the kind of villains, heroes, ne’er-do-wells, and everyday, well-meaning people you could meet in a mining town. The main character, SB Ellingson, runs a multi-generational newspaper that’s on the verge of going broke, as so many actual small-town newspapers have already done. She refuses to accept failure and decides to seek the truth about the proposed new mine and a missing water scientist. As she investigates, she mourns her dead wife, Ramona, a Two-spirit Anishinaabe/Ojibwe person. SB returns to the natural places they experienced together and is reminded of the ongoing relevance of their conversations about identity, land ownership, white accountability, and corporate environmental destruction.

Sarah: How do you perceive the connection between lesbians and the land/environment?

Dianna: In my memoir Wild Mares, I tell my own nonfiction story of living several years with lesbians in experimental land projects in the 1970s. We saw the land as a place to connect with nature, grow wholesome food, remake ourselves, and live sustainably. We wanted to get free of misogyny and gender oppression. That meant living just with women, becoming self-sufficient, and exploring our love and passions for one another. Most of us had few financial resources, so we tried to invent ways of living together that bridged private ownership and collective responsibilities.

It wasn’t easy, and the sustainability of lesbian land and lesbian community continues to be a point of discussion, struggle, and mentoring. I’m skeptical of some kinds of lesbian woo-woo, but I’ve been taking myself to nature and grounding myself in wild spaces since I was a child. That’s where I’ve found the sacred and recognized my roots. It’s complicated because my ancestors farmed, gardened, foraged, and hunted on this continent as immigrants, colonizers, and settlers.

It has to be said that we appropriated the lands we love from Indigenous people—Lakota, Dakota, and Anishinaabe, in my case. We have to find a way to account for land theft and help the Indigenous Land Back movement. And yet, the natural world still speaks to us and through us. As a young lesbian, I took myself to the land to heal and grow, and at seventy-four, I still look to nature for these gifts. My duty as a writer is to give back, to contribute to the restoration of the earth and to help foster a just and loving human community.

Sarah: As a college student and intern for Sinister Wisdom, I’ve learned a lot about lesbian history and how writing has allowed generations of lesbians to express and feel confident in their identity. From your perspective, what does writing/literature do for the LGBTQ+ community?

Dianna: Writing is a tool for reshaping the world. Besides giving enjoyment, one of the main uses of literature is teaching empathy. A writer creates a world for the reader to step into and experience through the eyes of others—that is, the characters the writer has created. It’s hard to enter another’s world so deeply without gaining insight and a sense of commonality. In our case, as lesbians and other queer-identified people (and even as women, for those of us who identify that way), we’ve found our true selves in literature by writing ourselves into it. Like BIPOC people, we were misrepresented in the old white male canon, and without accurate representation, no one is truly seen. Representation is a necessary condition for shaping a more empathetic world. So is the unmediated voice. We need to speak for ourselves and represent ourselves, not just for the sake of accuracy (though that’s part of it), but to make ourselves be seen as plausible, strong, primary characters, not just sidekicks, buddies, neighbors, and villains. We need to tell our own stories.

Sarah: Who are some of your own personal lesbian literary heroes/inspirations?

Dianna: There are so many to choose from! Where do I start and end? Patricia Highsmith, Jane Rule, Rita Mae Brown, Pat Parker, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rosemary Keefe Curb and Nancy Manahan, Audre Lorde, Paula Gunn Allen, Starhawk, and Emma Donoghue—to name just a few in a long and cherry-picked list. Most recently, I appreciated Emma Donoghue’s novel Learned by Heart, a searingly emotional re-imagination of Eliza Raine’s first love with the diary-writing Anne Lister (subject of the TV series Gentleman Jack) at their girls’ boarding school in the early 19th century.

Sarah: How does your work fit into the larger conversation of lesbian representation and/or environmentalism?

Dianna: My work fits somewhere between ‘eco-feminist lesbian writing’ and the literature people are calling ‘Queer Ecology’ or ‘EcoQueer.’ My novel is a genre-crosser that normalizes the blurring of binaries and borders. It’s a whodunit, a romance, and a serious exploration of what a small collection of strong women, lesbians, genderqueer people, and allies do to uphold each other when their community breaks down in the face of economic desperation, industrial greed, racism, homophobia, and the threat of environmental ruin. My memoir tells the nonfiction story of actual young lesbians in the mid-1970s pioneering our own real-life versions of the kind of eco-feminist, speculative, back-to-nature community Sally Gearhart imagined in her 1978 novel, The Wanderground.

Sarah Horner is a writer, a recent graduate of the University of Minnesota, and an intern at Sinister Wisdom. Her poetry and fiction are published or forthcoming in places such as Across the Margin, The Minnesota Review, Defunkt Magazine, and The Bitchin’ Kitsch. She lives in Minneapolis with her cat Goose.

Dianna Hunter is a writer, lesbian, farmer, and educator based in Duluth, Minnesota. Hunter’s experience growing up in rural North Dakota informed her memoir, Wild Mares: My Lesbian Back-to-the-Land Life, a finalist for the 2018 Minnesota Book Award. She has taught writing and gender studies at four universities, including the University of Wisconsin-Superior. Hunter’s recent novel, Clouded Waters, is described as “an environmental thriller/whodunit/Sapphic romance.”

Age Brings Them Home to Me
windflower
Finishing Line Press, 2024, 45 pages
$19.99

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

In her collection Age Brings Them Home to Me, windflower uses the perspective from Mother Earth to see everything life offers: family, love, self-actualization, and justice.

In poems like “I am from the ocean” and “Seeds of Fear,” windflower tells the story of her family’s genealogy as if they were ocean tides. She writes, “I am from the ocean / of my mother’s womb / that liminal space:” (4). The colon at the end of the poem is intentional: it acts as a gateway to the ocean that is her family—the ever-flowing tides and sporadic waves.

“Seeds of Fear” is a prose poem grappling with the mixed feelings family can stir up, especially for queer people. Battling religious trauma, the speaker realizes that their family can be a source of comfort: “The trinity of us huddle on the dusty pink couch in absolution of love” (15). These familial poems ebb and flow like the ocean in content and theme.

In the same vein, love is explored in a romantic sense with the speaker’s voice informed by the natural world. “Canoe me into deep waters” excels in natural imagery: “rain me to the ground, / light breeze me along / the lips of river’s currents, / thunderstorm me lightening / my bones to stars, / serenade me with sweet corn / salty butter dripping / from my mouth” (17). The speaker considers their lover just as essential and beautiful as nature. My personal favorite romantic line imbued with natural imagery is: “kisses that melted glaciers / kisses that know neither season nor coast.” (20). Equating a lover with Mother Earth conveys a deep devotion and is wonderful for a reader to witness.

In addition to genealogy and romantic love, windflower uses her devotion to nature for self-growth. In an anti-capitalist stride, she writes, “But what about those days I just want / to be a leaf on a bough. Waiting / to turn red” (23). It makes sense for windflower to express this sentiment, as nature is in no hurry. Imagining the speaker as a leaf waiting for the gentle renewal of seasons is peaceful and healing.

One poem stands out in Age Brings Them Home to Me. In “My First History Lesson,” windflower recounts the story her tenth-grade biology teacher told her about her son being murdered in Mississippi for registering Black voters. windflower beautifully and concisely tells his story. Even though the subject matter is challenging, this poem aligns with the rest of the collection, since windflower includes her signature nature imagery: “their bloody hands / hollowed stars from the sky / and the moon went mad” (35).

Overall, windflower’s poems are powerful because they are rooted in nature: the most powerful source of creative inspiration. Readers will hear echoes of Mary Oliver in windflower’s poetic voice housed in a chapel in the trees.

Courtney Heidorn (she/they) is a Sinister Wisdom intern. She holds a BA in English and creative writing from Azusa Pacific University. You can see more of their work in CURIOUS Magazine and at Pearl Press.

Grace Period
Elisabeth Nonas
Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2024, 286 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Judith Katz

Elisabeth Nonas’ lovely fourth novel, Grace Period, starts with a funeral—and a standup comedy act. The funeral is for Grace Black, an art history professor at a small college in Ithaca, New York. The comedienne filling us in on the details of the funeral is Grace’s partner of 25 years, 70-year-old Hannah Greene, who is on the edge of retiring from her position in the English department of that same college.

Grace was ten years Hannah’s junior. She died of a stroke on the way to Hannah’s retirement party, just weeks away from the start of her sabbatical. Going back and forth in time, Hannah traces the stories of her past and present life with Grace and the dashed hopes of what was to be their future. She spends the bulk of her grieving (and this novel) trying to figure out who she is and what she is meant to do now that Grace is gone.

Nonas has created an affable first-person narrator with Hannah. She’s a funny and self-deprecating Jewish butch whose sartorial choices run to polos, tees, shorts, and sweats.

Grace was the cook in the family and the gardener, too. When left to her own devices, Hannah feels lost in the beautifully appointed kitchen the couple designed together to meet Grace’s exacting specifications. Days into her grieving, Hannah is barely able to make herself a cup of espresso as she finds herself at odds with a newfangled coffee maker clearly purchased by Grace before her accident. Hannah can’t even figure out what to eat for dinner or, once having done that, how to prepare it.

Friends reach out, offer dinner and coffee dates, and even suggest she get a dog. But Hannah seems committed to her isolation. To establish some order in her life, Hannah begins to consult the imaginary Grace for advice about what to do next. She makes lists and slowly begins to follow them, heating up soup and eventually getting herself to eat it.

Hannah’s isolation doesn’t last for long. A few days after the funeral, a dusty Subaru, like the one Grace used to drive, roars up to the house. Out pop Cristina, the new instructor to the Art History department that Grace had hired, and Nicole, her lover. Unaware of Grace’s death, the two are caught off guard, but Hannah graciously offers them a temporary place to stay with the caveat that she won’t be very good company. The women reluctantly take Hannah up on her offer, and she seems to reluctantly welcome them in.

All the while, Hannah struggles to find solid memories of her life with Grace. Yes, there are souvenirs of their various trips together, like a particular bottle of wine that lets her reminisce. But none of these things seem sufficient. It isn’t until she finds herself cleaning out Grace’s office at the college where they both worked that Hannah finally stumbles onto evidence of something concrete that raises a memory. It’s precisely the kind of recollection a surviving partner would much rather forget, and yet, this hint of an event (which may or may not have happened) is exactly the thing that eventually brings Hannah toward a real sense of grieving and the core of her love for Grace.

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.

The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich
Julie Weiss
Bottlecap Press, 2023, 32 pages
$10.00

Reviewed by Pelaya Arapakis

The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich by Julie Weiss is a dazzling poetic collection that revels in the majesty and resilience of lesbian love. The chapbook gorgeously echoes Adrienne Rich’s 1976 work, Twenty-One Love Poems, both in essence and in form, indulging us with tender vignettes of a budding relationship set in Spain. Brimming with lush, image-laden descriptions of love, the collection can be read as a tribute not only to Rich but to lesbian erotic histories.

Weiss imbues a potent sensuality throughout her collection, punctuating scenes of the daily mundane with a lust of cosmic proportions. In poem VI, the narrator is overwhelmed by the surging currents of desire: “Every / object I hand to you takes the shape / of rapture. We are two women / on a park bench, daydreaming, the space / between our hips unbearable” (6). The narrator aches for the touch of her lover, and this need for her lover’s embrace has become a basic necessity of life, much like food. This is strikingly distilled in poem II, where the narrator muses, “How, even before I learn the word for / starvation, mine navigates the expectation of your breasts, your belly, the placid trail / downwards” (2). The ebb and flow of all-encompassing desire is also mirrored in The Jolt’s poetic structure. Weiss’ poems are arranged in five sets of couplets, and the poet plays with the constraints of this framework with dexterity. The emotional intensity of her poems often pushes up against the borders of this structure, threatening to burst right off the page.

In the same breath, Weiss refuses sanitised depictions of lesbian love and does not shy away from portraying the tensions that come with being visibly queer. Public displays of affection are often disrupted by intruding scenes of casual homophobia and sexual harassment. In poem VIII, the narrator soberly recounts, “In London, a couple like us was harassed / on a bus. Assaulted. Kiss! they roared” (8). In poem XIV, a public kiss shared by the lovers provokes a “leer of ruffians” (15). However, the transcendent nature of the couple’s love resists heterosexist hostility with both radiance and vigour. The narrator declares in poem IX, “I’d write an ocean full of poems, pull / the haters under the surging tide of our love” (9). Weiss does just that. Her collection stands as a testament to the sheer strength and beauty of a love that knows no bounds. The Jolt is a feast for the heart.

Pelaya Arapakis (she/her) is a Sinister Wisdom intern based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. She holds a BA in History from The University of Melbourne and is currently completing her Master’s in Arts and Cultural Management. She is also a musician and cultural worker. She is passionate about lesbian archiving, culture, and history.

unalone
Jessica Jacobs
Four Way Books, 2024, 210 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Sisel Gelman

unalone by Jessica Jacobs is a poetry collection about longing—a deep, profound longing for the meaning, guidance, and connection found in the intersection between the physical and the spiritual worlds. Jacobs takes the twelve parshiyot (portions) of Genesis and revives the Old Testament with a refreshing series of personal stories and reflections that highlight the timelessness of our shared humanity across time and space with an emphasis on the contemporary now.

Throughout the text, Jacobs presents the urgency of the physical world with grace and vulnerability. Jacobs relates the lessons of the Bible to her upbringing, to her mother, to the love she has for her wife, and to the mundanity of life. The effect is magnetic, as the personal references trail into the sphere of myth themselves. Her personal stories become just as important and relatable as the stories of the Bible, maybe even more so. We see our own lives reflected in them. Jacobs also does not shy away from the topic of misogyny and racism in our day and age. The poignant references to injustice, mass shootings, and acts of overt antisemitism call upon the reader to reflect on the brokenness of the world and how it can begin to be healed. This is, once again, a world we recognize with our own eyes.

Jacobs embraces the magnitude of Genesis in her storytelling. She acknowledges how these stories feel larger than life and incorporates this grand tone and perspective into her literary style. Jacobs drops the audience right into the middle of biblical scenes so that they can experience the huge moments firsthand with all of their joys, stressors, and questions. The experience is made new again through a distinctive empathic lens. Jacobs asks herself how the underrepresented and silenced women of the Old Testament felt. She asks, “What was their perspective like?” It’s beautiful and touching to see these women gain a voice as Jacobs experiments with her own through unusual line placement and enjambment.

When I asked Jacobs why it’s important to talk about the intersection of queerness and feminism in terms of religion, she responded with the following: “Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, advises us to place a fence around the Torah. This is a means of guarding it, of making its teachings and traditions sacred (a word that literally means to set apart). But as I explore in unalone’s first poem, “Stepping through the gate,” such fences can often be barriers, keeping people out—a fact especially true for women and perhaps even more so for queer folks. So many of us were raised to believe that there wasn’t a real place for us in religion, except perhaps as mothers and helpmeets to men. Scholars and poets like Alicia Ostriker and Eleanor Wilner showed us how we can take these stories back, look into the holes in the text, to all the women's stories written there in invisible ink, and bring them out into the light. And as a queer woman, it feels important that I permitted myself to also see my own experiences reflected in these stories, as I hope it might also help others find their way back into traditions that are theirs if they want them.”

One of my favorite poems in the collection is titled “Creation Stories,” and it evokes the desire Adam and Eve had for each other. In the poem, there is a longing to be complete—to be larger than the sum of individual parts. Through the metaphor of human companionship, we peek at the urge to be reunited with a divine fullness that is telling of Jacobs’s intuitive inclination towards the holy. This poetry collection insists there is something powerful and elevated in the spiritual realm, and through study and reflection, we might attain a fraction of it. This fraction will guide and heal us. It will bring us closer to the meaning we seek in such a chaotic world. Love will save us: the love we have for each other, for ourselves, our traditions, our history, and the sacred.

Sisel Gelman was raised in Mexico City and moved to Alaska to write her first novel. Her writing has been nominated for two EVVY Awards, she has won an ICPA award, and #siselgelman has over 3.2 million views on TikTok. Sisel is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her MA at the Bread Loaf School of English.

Love the World or Get Killed Trying
Alvina Chamberland
Noemi Press, 2024, 274 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Sarah Parsons

Towards the middle of Alvina Chamberland’s autofiction novel Love the World or Get Killed Trying, the narrator takes the reader on a journey through a fever-induced fantasy of a life with footballer Ronaldo Nazário, in which she imagines herself “Queen Yoko Ono–Feminist Havoc-Wreaker Of The Football World!” By this point, the reader is well-acquainted with Chamberland’s uniquely humorous voice, which often takes the text into delightful surrealist territory. Love the World, Chamberland’s English-language debut, is a confessional story of one woman’s journey through Iceland, continental Europe, and California (sometimes in the moment, sometimes through memory). If Love the World is an adventure novel, then the reader serves as a sidekick of sorts. It often feels as though there is a dialogue taking place between reader and narrator, with Alvina tending the conversation, not unlike daily updates to a personal blog.

The novel buoys between hugely external moments in packed gay bars and Icelandic fjords, as well as more internal moments, reflecting on memory and life within the imagination. We are guided by Alvina’s inner monologue, which swings from dark humor to unexpected glee. Layered within the humor is a sense of solemnity; this is a book about survival, too, and the ongoing struggle to survive as a transgender woman. The reader experiences the world through Alvina’s eyes, as she encounters men who view her as an object of conditional desire all while she searches for a deeper, kinder love. Alvina meditates often on the subject of her own death: when it might come and how. She lives in a state of precarity, not by her own making, but by that of a patriarchal and transphobic culture. Alvina is a woman with a thirst for life–ever the intrepid traveler, she runs across the Icelandic countryside, bathes under waterfalls, and dreams up futures for herself with strangers. Yet, she has experienced great sorrow and pain. “Why,” she asks the reader, “does a male Buddhist monk write a book titled In Love With the World while a trans woman names her novel Love the World or Get Killed Trying?” This is the question at the heart of the novel.

Readers who enjoy journeys of self-discovery and adventure will find themselves drawn into the wonderful world of Alvina Chamberland. As the novel unfolds, its depth becomes apparent, and the reader will likely find themselves growing fond of the narrator and her idiosyncratic voice. This novel spans countries, oceans, and years of Alvina’s life. It is an ambitious piece of literature that I imagine will leave readers with the same burning sense of desire for existence that Alvina lives by. As Chamberland writes, “I have decided to cast my vote for a life governed by the principle that everything is meaningful.” This book affords a great deal of care to the full range of moments in a day and a life.

Sarah Parsons is a Sinister Wisdom intern and writer based in Oregon whose work can be found online in Paperbark Magazine.

My Withered Legs and Other Essays
Sandra Gail Lambert
University of Georgia Press, 2024, 152 pages
$23.95

Reviewed by Kali Herbst Minino and Darla Tejada

My Withered Legs is Sandra Gail Lambert’s new memoir essay collection observing shifting relations between the different facets of her life–including writing, disability, aging, and autonomy.

Throughout, Lambert conceives of and interrogates power through a spectrum of in/dependence. Due to the societal and familial context of her upbringing—pre-Rehabilitation Act America in a military family—Lambert, particularly in her youth, equates power with a masculinist idea of strength.

Even in its mere recounting, the machismo attitude Lambert displays—one that values strength and abhors vulnerability—is off-putting, a testament to her evocative writing and presence on the page. Yet the moments when she feels most powerful because she exerts an inordinate amount of physical, mental, and emotional strength become especially poignant when contextualised within the dominant capitalist culture.

A careful reader will recognise that Lambert’s attitude in insisting to navigate, without help, a society that does not consider—and therefore was not built—for her needs is a symptom of living in a culture where (perceived) ability is currency. In a hyper-individualist America where humanity is reduced to a tokenistic autonomy, isolating independence is valued above community.

Lambert’s narrative triumphs in subtly challenging her own entrenched ideas of power. Illustrated by the shifting dynamics of her relationship with her mother and with her partner Pam, readers experience Lambert’s hard-won self-acceptance of being cared for. Her depiction of care work is nuanced, riddled with guilt and triumph, fear and freedom, and caring for is irrevocably intertwined with taking care of. Throughout this process we see how Lambert comes to understand that, just as “Disability was different from illness,” so too is vulnerability different from weakness.

Despite the specificity of Lambert’s perspective and experience, her writing is bound to resonate with readers of all kinds. Artfully covering topics of independence, the writing process, aging, and familial and romantic relationships, the collection of essays is about much more than the title suggests—her legs.

It is surprising that the collection is titled My Withered Legs. In the essay of the same name (though with the addition of “what is lost” in parenthesis), Lambert details a public obsession with her legs, with editors demanding to hear more details about them. Following this advice would erase the original point of her writing.

Choosing My Withered Legs as the collection’s title serves a dual purpose. It satiates the editor’s and the public’s obsession with her legs, which then drives the point of the titular essay home. I imagine an able-bodied reader—picking up the book because they are infatuated with the idea of reading about Lambert’s legs and struggles with disability—having a rude awakening when they realize they’ve played into the exact issue the author is critiquing.

The challenges Lambert faces in publishing her writing leave questions about what didn’t make it through the editorial filter, i.e. “My Withered Legs (what is lost),” and whether or not her wide appeal is something to be celebrated. In “Crip Humor,” Lambert explains that people using wheelchairs and their community would find the story funny. Explaining the joke makes the essay understandable to a large audience, but it became Lambert’s role to make that kind of understanding possible. If Lambert hadn’t had to cater to an able-bodied audience, how would the essay differ?

Readers can only speculate the answer to that question, and can only imagine exactly what was lost. In the meantime, Lambert’s collection is a perfect read for anyone pondering power—inside or outside the pages.

Kali Herbst Minino is a freelance journalist based in Seattle who works primarily for Seattle Gay News. They use a restaurant job to help fund their freelance journalism habit and love reading about labor movements, feminism, and media studies.

Darla Tejada is a writer and reader based in Naarm/Melbourne whose work has been published in Archer Magazine and Kill Your Darlings, among others. Her greatest achievement thus far is her 800-day Duolingo streak.