Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead
Hayley Singer
Upswell, 2023, 176 pages
$23.09

Reviewed by Gabe Tejada

Abandon Every Hope is a poetic meditation on violence. The title of Hayley Singer’s book of essays may conjure up Dante’s words, yet while “Abandon all hope, ye who enter” serves as an ominous warning, Singer’s “Abandon every hope” is more plaintive advice. Though hell is evoked through explicit descriptions of inhumane acts to which non-human beings are subjected, the horror of violence is never crass. Grief and introspection are allowed to take up space—a silence concomitant with the racket of violence.

Singer wields this silence in a way that amplifies the cruelty and tragedy inherent in the subject matter of the book—violence against animals, including human ones—without rendering their discourse cliché. The structure of the thanatography, with its pockets of pause between paragraphs embodied by ellipsis, allows for silence to be represented on the page. For Singer, in order to write about violence against animals, one must chart a “language of abandonment” (37). And since abandonment is a “mode of disappearance” (42), its language requires silence. But even as silence stands for the void left behind, it also echoes the means of mass death that causes these absences. These silences are the colourless, odourless carbon monoxide used by meat processing corporations to gas thousands of pigs to deal with the COVID-19 “backlog” (147-155). These silences are the “mediating apparatuses” that “disfigure[] (and shield[] us from) violence” (130). These silences are the non-language of non-human animals that render their pain invisible and unheard.

These silences bored into the body of the text are points of expansion, “drill(ed) holes into language” (81) that allow for “the place of erasure, absence” (83) to take up space in the present. In Singer’s prose-poetry, silence is part of meaning and expression—a harkening to their practice of “writing at the edge of what’s publishable.” As Abandon Every Hope traverses the boundaries segregating human and animal, presence and absence, life and death, it challenges the “immunitary defence(s) against animality” (62) we’ve used to impose—and justify—our supremacy.

Just as silence becomes an integral part of the language of abandonment, so too does it become part of the language of return and reconciliation. Here, silence also stands for Singer’s immobility in the face of such ubiquitous violence, even the violence to which they subject themself. Weaving in their struggle with alcoholism and depression lends a personal, vulnerable bend to the interspecies harm perpetrated by the animal-industrial complex (AIC). We are drowned, just as Singer is, in a perpetual cycle of coping against the atrocities surrounding us and the escalation of these atrocities, driving us to “navigate the infinity between wanting and doing with sharper instruments” (58). The vulnerability of their failure is a point of connection with the reader, just as it shows how deeply connected Singer is to animal liberation. Despite drawing parallels between their personal struggle and the violence inflicted on animals and those most affected by the AIC, Singer never veers into self-indulgence. Singer recognizes their privilege and acknowledges that the “meat processing workforce… is largely made of immigrants and refugees” (149), those most vulnerable in our white-supremacist and racist societies. Many human animals, as critical race studies scholars Eve Tuck and C. Ree write, “have been (and continue to be) made killable” (76), just as non-human animals are.

There is no comfort at the end of Singer’s book. No hope for change or a better future. The last sentence of the final essay, an unnamed company’s slogan—“A cut above the rest” (155)—insinuates violence coming from a place of such height and power that it can never be stopped. But hopeless as these essays may be, they marry literary invention and political imaginings. Singer displaces comfortability as a locus for political thought and action, insisting that fighting for collective liberation—even when abandoned by every hope—must be done.

Gabe Tejada is a Filipino reader and writer based in Naarm. Her work has been published by Archer Magazine online and Kill Your Darlings (KYD), among others. You can find her reading queer books on the 58 tram, going for aimless walks, and eating camembert stuffed croissants.

Palimpsest
Courtney Heidorn
Bottlecap Press, 2024, 28 pages
$10.00

Reviewed by Sara Ricci

Love Through the Sweetness of a Strawberry: A Review of Courtney Heidorn’s Palimpsest

The strawberry serves as a focal point in Courtney Heidorn’s new poetry collection, Palimpsest. From the first pages, the author translates the act of slicing the sweet fruit into pieces into a tender beginning of pure eroticism and intense passion felt towards another woman. However, Heidorn’s work in this context, the simple and everyday act of cutting and preparing, also measures the passage of time. From “strawberry summer I” to “strawberry summer II,” the scene changes, or rather, it progresses, effectively conveying the idea of inevitable, slow, and perfectly natural change. Here, in the midst of quartering the strawberry, the light of the first episode dims and fades, just as the invisible barriers of a relationship seem to intensify with every single movement of the blade slicing through the juicy, ready bodies of the strawberries.

This intensification reaches its peak in the third episode, “strawberry summer III”: the woman present in the first part of this narrative seems to disappear, leaving only the strawberry, which thus becomes the entire foundation, the fundamental representation of the author’s most intimate intentions. The shift in perception is an indicator of evolution: Courtney Heidorn grows and changes; she too progresses, as if to say, “Now I know myself and can afford not to alter what overwhelms me.” Empowered by this growth, she does not need to flee from her emotions. The strawberry remains the same, only divided in two, and most importantly, still attached to the green stem, which adds that edgy but necessary bitterness to the familiarity of the fruit’s sweetness on the tongue.

What emerges in Heidorn’s work, in their “touching, searching,” is the inherent need to be discovered, understood, and desired, with the intention “to beg / for something you didn’t know you needed.” In the deeply sought intimacy of the relationships they describe, Courtney is fully human: they savor, live, and recount with embarrassment for their “overfilled heart,” despite always being met with the caring availability of the one they address.

With a rhythm “enchanted” by sweetness—but also infused with cruelty—Palimpsest rediscovers the quintessential sapphic love and more: it emphasizes the importance of exploring the darkest depths of the self to uncover and learn to navigate one’s habits, starting from the history and concrete essence of the author. Here, Courtney Heidorn is completely and unapologetically open to the reader, who consequently becomes a friend and a listener. A must-read!

Sara Ricci is an editor and a writer from Bitonto, Italy. She graduated in southern Italy in foreign languages, and she is now an intern at Sinister Wisdom. She is an editor and writer for Gazzetta Filosofica, an Italian magazine about philosophy applied to things of everyday life. She also appears in other Italian magazines, such as Fatti Per La Storia, L’Indiscreto, and Kairos.

Desert Haven
Penelope Starr
Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2024, 234 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Sandra Butler

Penelope Starr is a gatherer of stories. Founder of Odyssey Storytelling, a community storytelling event now celebrating its twentieth year, she understands how our stories illuminate the commonalities of our lesbian lives while leaving lots of room for the unique and distinct way each woman makes and lives her choices. I was grateful to enter the world of women’s land with her as my guide. Starr is a lesbian equipped not with theories, hypotheses, or assumptions but with curiosity and admiration for the choices and experiences of the landdykes who come to life on these pages.

There has been much written analyzing, theorizing, and assessing the history of lesbians returning to live on the land, but very little from inside the lived experience of the lesbians themselves. The fifteen stories in Desert Haven introduce us to a wonderfully varied mix of women, each deserving of their own novel, and together, they blend into an ever-shifting patchwork of personalities, relationships, and communal life.

Originally conceived as a documentary film for which Starr did dozens of in-depth interviews, the means to create the documentary fell through; several of the women died or moved away, and others decided they didn’t want to be public. Starr took the raw material she had gathered and wrote a novel, Desert Haven, inspired by these lesbians and told their stories to a readership eager for them. She introduces us to this constantly shifting cast of characters in a series of first-person stories, helping us understand their motivations and need to be part of an all-lesbian environment that would support and nurture their lives.

The work at Desert Haven was unrelenting, and the resources were few. The decision to choose a financially marginal, physically demanding, and fiercely idealistic life took courage. Why did they come? What had they left behind, and what did they find in this new community with other women who had moved off the conventional grid to a life entirely away from the dominant culture in a world of their own making?

Some were fleeing abusive family lives, searching for direction and meaning; others were passionately separatist dykes, women who wanted a world without men and were hungry to come to rest in an all-women’s space. Some women moved to Desert Haven, put down roots and pulled them up again after a few seasons to move on to their next adventure. Each was dedicated to living life on her own terms and prepared to pay whatever price was required to do that. We watch them move in and out of relationships, fall fiercely in love, become friends, break up, or form lasting family bonds. We listen to their firmly held beliefs about equalizing resources and responsibilities and differing opinions about trans women on the land. Community meetings were alternately cooperative and contentious, and rituals were revered by some and dismissed by others. The honoring of Mother Earth was an organizing principle, even as the land was in an ongoing state of order and disorder.

The scaffolding for these stories is provided by JoJo, the welcoming and stabilizing woman who bought this piece of land and held it for any lesbian who needed to be there. We follow the ever-changing cast of characters from Dee, who arrived in 1977, to JoJo’s death in 2014 when her daughter-by-choice inherits this historic bit of land and is left to imagine what the future might look like. Luckily for us, Starr is working on that!

I remember those days in my own lesbian-feminist life. The urgency, the passion, and the commitment to making a life that would honor, value, and support every woman–whether we agreed with her or not! It was hard work then and continues to be hard work now. Yet it’s what is required of us as we dykes dream and imagine and create. I am grateful for Starr’s stories and these women. I saw a bit of myself in nearly all of them and marveled at their doggedness, their trust in one another, and the ways they created the dream of a different future in their lives.

Sandra Butler writes about whatever is still unspoken in women’s lives. The Kitchen is Closed: And Other Benefits Of Being Old is a collection of the musings of an old lesbian-feminist. Leaving Home at 83 will be published in October 2024.

The Velvet Book
Rae Gouirand
Cornerstone Press, 2024, 124 pages
$21.95

Daughter
Maureen Eppstein
Finishing Line Press, 2024, 42 pages
$19.79

woke up no light: poems
Leila Mottley
Knopf, 2024, 128 pages
$28.00

Reviewed by Henri Bensussen

Three Books about Life and Death: Poems Both Sweet and Tart, Like Certain Desserts

The Velvet Book opens with quotes from three poems by Lucie Brock-Broido that reference velvet as a robe, a curtain (“Carnivorous”), a metaphor for a school of courtesan (“Still Life with Aspirin”), and as an animal pelt (“Fame Rubies”). This last description is prefaced by “The diagnosis is not possible.” Gouirand’s couplets across the ninety-one pages of this book-length poem are a response to Brock-Broido’s request, before she died in 2018, to “remember me.”

There was a “time of velvet,” and Gouirand wants to remember it in every way, in all its velvety manifestations, as speech, bone-hard, or softly textured in deep or pale color. She moves through the poem like an archivist to save the memories of the love they shared, what they experienced together, and how it is to be left as the loved partner slowly drifts away and disappears. Gouirand wants to capture every feeling, every dream and thought, to write them into an ode to her beloved Lucie and to those lovers everywhere we have lost/will lose as we age.

Her language is written in velvet, with grammar drenched in velvet metaphor. “I could duplicate the velvet book,” she writes. The Velveteen Rabbit is a children’s book about a stuffed toy rabbit in love with the young boy who owns it–so in love it wishes it could become a “real” rabbit. That cannot happen unless the boy “loves it enough.” Gouirand writes her love out in words as “real” as possible, as if she might bring her beloved back to life by doing so.

Rae Gouirand is the author of two collections of poetry, Glass is Glass Water is Water (Spork Press, 2018) and Open Winter (Bellday Books, 2011), as well as four chapbooks. Her work has appeared in two volumes of the Best New Poets series, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies nationwide. She has received numerous fellowships and awards for her poetry and nonfiction.

Maureen Eppstein’s Daughter is also about death, in her case, a first pregnancy that ended with a “stillbirth,” a word that foretells the penultimate moment of expulsion into personhood, the fateful stillness of a life that lives only as a memory. She pours out her story in small poems, releasing history and the emotions she had buried, now, at age eighty-six. These poems are the chapters in a tale of a young woman, married less than a year, about to give birth, and the doctor who didn’t believe her, who said don’t call me at 3 a.m. She trusted him; after all, she’d been brought up to care for others, obey directions, and to not make a fuss.

Not allowed to mourn, she must stay silent, she must “carry on”; she was simply “ill.” Years later, widowed, living alone near the sea and surrounded by a community of women, she finally lets herself acknowledge the truth of it and allows herself to honor this daughter, naming her “Jane.” She visits the grave in a New Zealand cemetery, where she hears voices of the dead: “we are the birds,” they whisper. At home, the swallows build a nest above her kitchen door. She watches them fledge. She feels the connection with nature in “an interwoven chain of being.” These are poems of resilience and hope that nurture us with life and comfort us even in death.

Originally from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Maureen Eppstein earned an M.A. in History from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, before moving to the U.S. in the late 1960s. She now lives on the Mendocino Coast of California and is a former executive director of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. Her work is strongly influenced by the poetry of Jane Hirshfield, with whom she has studied. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The focus in her poetry on the connectedness of all living things stems from the experience of visiting her stillborn daughter’s burial site, as described in this collection.

Leila Mottley, former Youth Poet of Oakland, CA, brings us her first book of poetry, following her debut novel Nightcrawling (Knopf, 2022), a New York Times best-seller and winner of major awards. Hers is a voice of the future, acknowledging death and danger but focused on life as she’s living it. It is a voice of anger at injustice and for a future of love without the old “shalt nots.” Hers is a voice of youthful exuberance and revolutionary statement.

woke up no light is divided into four types of “hood”: Girl, Neighbor, False, Woman, with a prologue about Reparations. She writes, “I am neither child or woman,” in the Girlhood section, and “a man is not a body—he is a warning.” By the Womanhood section, she is learning love and trust.” In the poem “How to love a woman sailing the sky,” she writes, “I flinched / until you showed me you / were not reaching through me / but for me / and then I was Yours.”

This is a physically tall and internally honest book from a young woman we are called to hear and respect. As Mahogany Browne states on the book’s back cover, it’s “a revolution of words and worlds… Mottley aims to set us all free.” As Maureen Eppstein shows in her poems how women are so often raised to obey and suffer, and as Rae Gouirand portrays through her velvet metaphors of remembrance and love, Leila Mottley sails us into a new climate for women of personal strength and agency, in charge of our own lives.

Henri Bensussen writes on themes of inter-personal/inter-species relationships, aging, and the comic aspects of the human condition from the viewpoint of a birder, biologist, and gardener. Currently, a book-length memoir is her focus, and she continues to publish poetry and creative non-fiction.

We Set the Night on Fire: Igniting the Gay Revolution
Martha Shelley
Chicago Review Press, 2023, 224 pages
$27.99

Coming Out, Becoming Ourselves: Lesbian Stories from the Daughters of Bilitis, 1969-1999
Lois Johnson and Sarah Boyer with Laura Catanzaro
Savvy Press, 2024, 302 pages
$21.95

Reviewed by Julia M. Allen

Two important new books chronicle the deep lesbian feminist histories often occluded by our June celebrations of parades and rainbows. Reading Martha Shelley’s We Set the Night on Fire in tandem with Lois Johnson and Sarah Boyer’s Coming Out, Becoming Ourselves, one becomes aware of the linkages between the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) and upstart groups such as the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Radicalesbians, linkages that led to increased lesbian activism and visibility. Johnson and Boyer offer a history of the Boston chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, while Shelley narrates her own development from studious daughter to militant writer and strategist in the radical feminist and gay rights movements.

Both books began in a shared moment in 1969. On June 28, two women from Boston arrived in New York to consult with DOB member Martha Shelley about starting a chapter. (Although readers may find it confusing that the names in the two accounts do not match, this is an artifact of the era, when women often used pseudonyms in lesbian organizations, as a matter of protection.) Shelley took them on a tour of Greenwich Village, whereupon they ran smack dab into the Stonewall riot. This alarmed the Bostonians, although Shelley dismissed the uproar, thinking it was a protest against the war in Vietnam.

At that point in the books, the two narratives diverge. We learn that when Shelley realized what they had witnessed, she began agitating for a response, and a month later, five hundred people marched in protest against the police raids on gay and lesbian bars. Johnson and Boyer say simply, “[The trip to New York] was the same weekend as the Stonewall uprising.”

After providing readers with a brief summary of the political climate in the US during the 1950s and the founding of the DOB in 1955 by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Johnson and Boyer devote the first half of their book to describing, with justifiable pride, the thirty-plus years of the Boston DOB, explaining the range of activities offered by the group and the political and educational work done by members. They focus on the most significant—the “rap” groups, where participants could talk about any aspect of lesbian life in a congenial atmosphere. They also point to the joyous Thanksgiving dinners hosted for years by Johnson and her partner Sheri Barden, offering community to those whose families of origin may have been less welcoming. Following this overview, Johnson and Boyer give us glimpses into the lives of DOB members, offering over fifteen edited transcripts of oral history interviews, almost all now with real names. Many of the stories follow a recognizable arc, from trauma, fear, and loneliness to safety in the DOB. The book is generously illustrated with color photos.

Like Johnson and Boyer, Martha Shelley also takes us back in time, narrating her own pre-Stonewall life in New York City, documenting the crescendo of humiliations endured by girls as they reached adolescence and thus setting the scene for her subsequent actions. From there, she traces the routes of her activism as it exploded after the post-Stonewall march she had instigated. She was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front; she joined Rita Mae Brown and others in carrying out the Lavender Menace action at the National Organization for Women’s Second Congress to Unite Women; she wrote for and typeset Come Out!, the publication of the Gay Liberation Front; she organized women to protest the incarceration of Angela Davis at the Women’s House of Detention; and then she moved to Oakland, California, joining Judy Grahn and others in the Women’s Press Collective.

While narrating these extraordinary efforts and achievements, both Shelley and Johnson and Boyer take care to recognize the accomplishments of others. Who among us knew, for instance, that NYU Student Homophile League member and GLF activist Ellen Broidy, with Craig Rodwell, owner of Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, first proposed what have become the annual Pride marches? And how many of us recognized the courage of the rank-and-file DOB members who came out to march carrying the DOB banners?

Although I appreciated the many life stories offered by Johnson and Boyer, I did find certain elements could be repetitive, and variations in voice seem to have been muted in many cases. I also wish that the authors had supplied an index. Likewise, I wish Martha Shelley had included a selection of her writings from the era, as many are now difficult to locate.

Nonetheless, Johnson and Boyer do provide a useful appendix with directions for rap leaders, a timeless document that current organizers can now consult, and Shelley has packaged her own hard-won advice for future activists. They offer these gifts because they know, as we all do, that our work is far from finished.

Julia M. Allen is Professor Emerita, English, Sonoma State University. She is the author of Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins, SUNY Press, 2013 and co-author with Jocelyn H. Cohen of Women Making History: The Revolutionary Feminist Postcard Art of Helaine Victoria Press, Lever Press, 2023.

Black Girl, Call Home
Jasmine Mans
Berkley, 2021, 256 pages
$17.00

Reviewed by Grace Gaynor

I have always struggled to claim my girlhood, to look back on my time spent as a child and believe in the purpose and worth I possessed as a young Black girl. For many Black women, this turmoil is recognizable, especially when a multitude of portrayals and celebrations of girlhood are built upon depictions of femininity steeped in whiteness. Since my first reading of Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans, I’ve carried my copy everywhere, the fully realized depiction of Black girlhood always feeling familiar and empowering. The love with which Mans discusses the experiences of Black girls and women is powerful enough to permeate the frost of a culture that disregards those who have been categorized as Black and female. In her book, Mans carefully considers the lives of Black girls and women and discusses a wide array of experiences, from meticulous cultivation of appearance and identity to the pressure of fitting in. With powerful and revealing messages that culminate in an intricate portrayal of existence as a Black girl, Black Girl, Call Home speaks to and with those who are often ignored in our society.

As a collection that acknowledges the intricate experiences of Black girls, Black Girl, Call Home aptly opens with two poems that discuss the beauty standards associated with Black girlhood. The first piece, entitled “I Ain’t Gon’ Be Bald Headed No More,” utilizes its simplicity to poignantly call attention to the pressure placed on Black girls to be hyper-conscious of physical appearance. As the speaker discusses her plans to get her hair done, she remarks that her hair has grown and goes on to say: “when I wear it out at school, / the rest of the girls / won’t call me bald-headed / no more” (2). The speaker feels that her chance to be considered acceptable and beautiful rests on the length and style of her hair, an idea further emphasized through the lines “Imma be pretty, / as soon as momma gets home / from work” (2). The speaker’s knowledge of the beauty standards that are constantly applied to her existence is revealed by her innate correlation between hair and being perceived as pretty. The following piece, “Momma Has a Hair Salon in the Kitchen,” takes the form of a lengthy list of items, terms, and sayings traditionally associated with taking care of Black hair. Throughout the piece, Mans juxtaposes words such as “poison” and “natural,” demonstrating the confusing messages that Black girls and women receive regarding their hair. Along with the previous piece, this poem further emphasizes the complicated nature of Black existence, especially in conjunction with the process of cultivating femininity.

For Black girls, noncompliance with the appearance and self-identity norms fabricated by those around them signifies a magnification of the oppression they face daily, demonstrated through retrospective pieces in Black Girl, Call Home. In “Momma Said Dyke at the Kitchen Table,” the speaker describes the experience of being told to refrain from adopting certain self-expressions simply because of categorization as a Black girl. This experience is exemplified through the reaction of the speaker’s mother to her coming out: “don’t you know / how hard it already is / for women like us, / why you gonna go / and make it harder on yourself?” (23). Mans utilizes this interaction to allude to the experiences of Black girls who do not comply with gender expectations, as Black women and girls are already alienated from the “ideals” of femininity because of racial categorization. The analysis of this experience sheds light on the difficulties Black women and girls face when they break away from the norms applied to them on the axis of race, sexuality, and gender identity.

The unique lives of Black girls and women are often not valued within our society because they have not been visible in conjunction with the work to uplift, empower, and acknowledge those experiencing girlhood and womanhood. Black Girl, Call Home not only demonstrates an effort to shed light on the lives of Black girls and women, but it treats these experiences with care. In her stunning collection, Jasmine Mans utilizes poetry to reveal the intricacies, triumphs, and struggles associated with Black girlhood in a way that Black girls and women deserve.

Grace Gaynor is a writer from Louisville, Kentucky. She earned her BA in English from Hollins University and is currently an MFA student studying creative writing at Virginia Tech. She is a Sinister Wisdom intern and serves as an editor for the minnesota review and SUNHOUSE Literary.

Carmilla
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, edited by Carmen Maria Machado
Lanternfish Press, 2019, 160 pages
$17.00
Originally published in The Dark Blue, 1871-1872, 139 pages

Reviewed by Chloe Weber

You may be familiar with the “lesbian vampire” narrative, one repeated in numerous books, films, and other forms of media. But from where did this narrative originate? Many argue that Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu set the stage for many of the lesbian and sapphic vampires we see today.

Carmilla, originally published as a serial in the London-based literary magazine The Dark Blue and later reprinted by Le Fanu in In A Glass Darkly (1872), predates its more famous counterpart, Dracula, by over twenty years. This novel is set in nineteenth-century Styria, a federal state of Austria, and follows teen protagonist Laura as she becomes acquainted with a strange new houseguest, Carmilla.

However, before the story begins, in the prologue of Carmilla, we learn that Laura has already passed away. This story is recounted as a case study by a man named Doctor Hesselius, who claims he corresponded with Laura, where she spoke in detail about her experiences with the vampire Carmilla. This correspondence was long presumed fictional until 1973, when Dr. Jane Leight uncovered within LeFanu’s study a stack of correspondence between a doctor and a woman called only “V.”

If we assume Laura and Doctor Hesselius are real, what of the vampire Carmilla, and what of the obviously queer relationship between the two women? Most scholars would say the lesbianism of Laura and Carmilla is no fiction. In fact, the letters written by V. are said to contain even more detail of her desire for Carmilla than what made it into Le Fanu’s manuscript. The truth is much more devastating: Carmilla is a story about “a young woman’s sexual awakening; [and] the senseless slaughter of her supposed defiler” (Carmen Maria Machado, vi).

Going into the novel with these considerations, I found Carmilla read less like a gothic horror and more like a story about queerness itself, with lesbianism as the focus. Carmilla lays her claim on Laura only moments after their first meeting, seeing it as fate bringing them together once more, as they both recall a shared “dream” of meeting as children. What follows is a tale in which Laura attempts to resist Carmilla’s various charms and claims on her life, brushing off her declarations of love as simple hysteria. Laura prefers to view Carmilla’s love as part of her weak countenance rather than accept her lesbianism. Carmilla experiences hours of apathy followed by ones of intense love, which she inflicts upon Laura, saying, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever.” Laura describes the behavior, “like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me…” (37).

Laura’s eventual sexual awakening towards Carmilla comes when she is pierced in the breast by a beastly figure, later revealed to be Carmilla in a vampiric form. Following this strange occurrence, Laura believes her health is declining rapidly, and she describes attraction towards Carmilla as one of her primary symptoms. Laura even describes an orgasm experienced in a dreamlike state as she imagines sensations of a woman kissing up to her throat (69).

The only solution to Laura’s afflicted state is to eliminate the source of her woes, as she discovers evidence that Carmilla is actually an immortal vampire named Millarca. Laura still longs to find Carmilla safe, despite the evidence and even as the object of her desire is staked and beheaded. This confirms that Laura’s lesbianism is not something that will go away, and it cannot be cured as if it were some malicious malady.

It is not a far-fetched assumption that the real Carmilla, a woman named Marcia, was not a vampire as described by V. but a simple lesbian. Thanks to Le Fanu, Marcia is immortalized as a vampiric monster rather than just a human who stole a wealthy girl’s affection.

What modern-day readers should take away from Carmilla is that their lesbianism is not a supernatural curse and that they may live freely and openly rather than live in fear of their identity. Laura’s, or V.’s, suppression of desire caused an unnatural amount of pain: it is possible that if these two women had embraced their love instead, their story might have ended differently.

Chloe Weber is a Sinister Wisdom intern for the May 2024 season, located remotely in Montclair, New Jersey. She attends Macalester College as a student of English and Anthropology, always on the hunt to expand her literary knowledge.

A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces that Shaped Queer Women’s Culture
June Thomas
Seal Press, 2024, 304 pages
$30.00

Reviewed by Judith Barrington

June Thomas is a terrific journalist whose Slate Working podcast is beloved by a wide audience. This well-researched piece of lesbian history is a great contribution to the story of our times.

For those of us older queer women, June Thomas’s detailed and engaging trip into the 1970s and 1980s is something of a nostalgia trip. Where are those women’s bookstores that spread generously across the United States? Where are the bars? Where are the lesbians growing themselves and their food on lesbian land? Of the six categories described in this book, I imagine that softball and sex-toy stores might have endured the longest, although I haven’t looked for either in quite a while. The most obvious surviving category is lesbian “vacation destinations,” which have long been promoted in the mainstream by the travel industry, making big bucks from our itchy gay feet.

The loss of places that were vital in connecting us to our community and the social movement that grew from it can be seen as a loss. At the same time, we must weigh up the gains we made as a result of those networks. Much of the social change envisaged by second-wave feminists, often with lesbians in the forefront, has been successful.

Younger lesbians who grew up in a queer culture friendlier than its predecessor may not realize the struggles that took place before gay marriage was won; they may not know that some of us were threatened with violence, institutionalized for “treatment,” or separated from our lovers through deportation. In those days, the spaces so clearly described in Thomas’s book were places of refuge, places of friendship, and places in which to foment revolution. Even now, we cannot take for granted that our hard-won progress is securely embedded; the attacks on abortion rights and access surely speak to that. I hope that young lesbians will find our history exciting and inspiring. Lesbian spaces may be different now, but we must not forget how much we need each other in order to keep progressing.

Judith Barrington is a poet and memoirist. Her book, Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs, will be published by Oregon State University Press in September 2024. Her previous memoir, Lifesaving, won the Lambda Literary Award. She is the author of five poetry collections and lives with her partner, Ruth, in Portland.

The Glass Studio
Sandra Yannone
Salmon Poetry, 2024, 98 pages
$13.03

Reviewed by Karen Poppy

How does one reckon with a father and with family, and how does one reckon with growth and grief? In The Glass Studio, Sandra Yannone does so expertly, combining the painful, sharp shards and melding them into costly, prismatic beauty. She dedicates this poetry collection in memory of her father and paternal grandmother, two family members whose inexorable influence on Yannone (and her responding tenderness towards them) is palpable.

Within Yannone’s collection, we find family and patriarchal myths pieced together. The myths, like the stained glass, fused and shimmering, are dangerous and alluring in their creation and perpetuation, but an art form of liberation when we act in their dismantling. Dismantling myths is a key component of the quest for love and understanding. On the journey to reach love and understanding, one of the poems, “The Properties of Glass,” explains that “we are not anywhere / a map can call / home. We are not anywhere / a map can comprehend” (76).

To gain wisdom and reach love and understanding for ourselves, we must look back towards home. We must return to our familial origins, which Yannone deftly retraces in The Glass Studio. She writes that like a lover gifted “a petite, stout jar / of tap water and sea glass / worn down / by years / of turbulent waves / and rocks,” we learn about “the things that have cut me open and made me bleed” (9). Time smooths over the shared vulnerabilities and beautifies pain caused by sharpness. Pain becomes stained glass, glistening in waves of words, and loving; imperfect family members roll in the poetic, rocky deep.

The book’s structure maintains the varied patterns and repetitions of stained glass, divided into four parts, with four poems titled “The Glass Studio,” mirroring the book’s title. In the aforementioned poem in the book’s third section, the speaker looks back at her fourteen-year-old self in her father’s stained glass art studio, stuck in time and place, symbolically and in a photograph. Yannone writes of a photograph taken on

“an early morning in my father’s makeshift sweatshop / on the unfinished second floor of my grandparents’ house, / leaning over beige glass squares arranged / in a plaster-poured mold, my Red Sox cap / cocked backwards like a trigger / waiting for release…” (62).

We see the speaker through this photograph, this memory, “cocked backwards like a trigger” (like her Red Sox cap), seemingly frozen at this moment but ready for release.

The speaker looks back, older and wiser, with wisdom informing her of ways the family system poisoned and trapped her. She describes coming of age through her father’s craft and the patriarchy’s myth—rendering splendor and dazzling truth from toxicity. Wisdom allows for a slow, thawing release, not the quick pull of a trigger, in this poem and throughout the collection. Yannone is released from patriarchal myth as she finds release from family myth through retelling her story. In patriarchal myth, the gorgon, with coiled snakes writhing on her head, has such a gruesome appearance that men turn to stone merely by looking at her. The powerful gorgon, once revered as a protectress and representative of women who healed others, becomes fearsome and ugly—and dangerous—within the patriarchy’s story.

For the speaker, the coiled snakes melt in the making of stained glass into seams, bringing together and holding the glass, which appears beautiful in the light but is as brittle as male fragility. Those socialized as female learn at a young age that their power must melt away- that they must pacify and hold everything together. They must make everything beautiful. The speaker also learned this skill from her father in making stained glass:

“my left hand / steadying the burning soldering iron / while I push coiled snakes of lead / into the iron’s hot tip to melt them / into quick silver seams, fusing / those cut glass squares / into translucently beautiful panes / if I hold them up to the light / breaking through the second floor / window” (62). The melting of the gorgon’s coiled snakes is as harmful and poisonous as it is difficult: “I sweat through this labor. / I breathe in the noxious fumes” (62).

Within this toxicity, there is also genuine love and important teaching from the speaker’s father. Yannone transforms her father’s example from destructiveness into healing, sapphic passion. She ultimately transforms what breaks women through her precise and gentle lovemaking:

“I wear no protective mask. My hot pink / lungs slow burn towards death. Hour / after hour, I run my hands like this, iron / and lead, like over the seams of women’s bodies / it will take years for me to touch. / I use the same precision to bring them / full circle, to where they become / translucent. / My father will teach me all this / with squares of cut glass, not ever / saying the word “sex,” without ever / claiming to transfer the knowledge of how / he broke my mother’s body / to create something sacred / akin to a family” (62-63).

This review ends with fitting words from another poem in this collection: “And in response to my longing, / I burn the toast” (68).

Karen Poppy has a debut full-length collection, Diving at the Lip of the Water, published by Beltway Editions (2023), and lauded by the legendary Judy Grahn for its demonstration of “paradox and power.” She has two chapbooks published with Finishing Line Press, and another chapbook published with Homestead Lighthouse Press: Crack Open/Emergency, our own beautiful brutality, and Every Possible Thing.

Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion
Eleanor Medhurst
Hurst, 2024, 344 pages
$34.95

Reviewed by Gabe Tejada

Unsuitable is a fitting title for fashion historian Eleanor Medhurst’s debut. As Medhurst illustrates, lesbian fashion—regardless of where it falls on the masculine-feminine spectrum—has always been transgressive. Throughout the book, we see how the donning of the lesbian closet’s unsuitable clothing is almost always penalised. Though far from a comprehensive history of lesbian fashion due to its geographical limitation (a more suitable subtitle would be A History of North American and European Lesbian Fashion, With a Brief Layover in Japan), Unsuitable remains an accessible and important introduction to lesbian sartorial history.

The book begins with the trinity of European lesbian historical figures: Sappho, Queen Christina of Sweden, and Anne Lister. Though their inclusion is integral in showing that “We Were Always Here,” these chapters almost make the emptiness of pre-1900s lesbian history starker and highlight how western-centric lesbian history is. This centering is ameliorated in the section’s chapter on 1910s Japan, our first glimpse of lesbian fashion’s ties—through the literary publication Seitō —with feminist politics and a broader lesbian community. By wearing the more masculine “umanori hakama” (the first iteration of Japanese girls’ school uniform, later replaced by the more feminine “andon hakama”) Hiratsuka Raichō, Otake Kokichi, and their Seitō society assert both cultural and gender/sexual identity, proving that one need not be sacrificed for the other. Medhurst shows how these garments were a revolt against the patriarchal ideal of the “ryōsai kenbo” (‘good wife, wise mother’)” (48), which emerged as education was opening up for Japanese women.

Part two pays homage to the 1920s, and though the chapters could have benefited from showing how the different locales’ (Britain, Paris, Berlin, and New York) fashion zeitgeists influenced each other, Medhurst nonetheless illuminates the immense contributions of lesbians to fashion—within and without their community—through the promotion of gender subversive styles in literary magazines. Lesbian fashion was literally in British Vogue. And publications like Frauenliebe and Die Freundin testify that trans identity and experience have always been a part of lesbians’—and their clothing’s—history.

The butch-femme interlude, unfortunately, left more to be desired. While Medhurst recognised that butch-femme dress codes went beyond expression and “were a means to express community and difference, push and pull, attraction and competition” (118), she did not delve into how these clothes were worn, touched, and presented in a manner unique to butches and femmes. Clothing was foundational to the courting rituals of the mid-century lesbian bar, and readers are left wanting for Medhurst’s insights and opinions on this phenomenon.

Those incensed by how undervalued and underappreciated drag kings’ artistry is will revel in “Miraculous Masculinity.” Here, we understand breeches’ roles and how other forms of male-impersonation performance art flourished in the UK and eventually in the US. Medhurst also captures how Black artistry and resistance went hand-in-hand, in the latter half of the section dedicated to Gladys Bentley and Stormé DeLarverie. Structuring Bentley’s chapter around excerpts from “I Am A Woman Again,” Medhurst acknowledges the cultural and socio-political climate during which Bentley penned the essay and recognised—without bitterness and without letting the piece eclipse the bold bravery of Bentley’s legacy—that Bentley had the right to protect herself amid growing hostility and persecution of queer people. Readers will also appreciate how Medhurst renders DeLarverie in sartorial three-dimensionality, “her stage self, her street self, and her softer, personal self” (157). In each iteration, we see DeLaverie’s determination to live—as much for herself as for her beloved queer community.

Sartorial choices in feminist/lesbian movements are akin to donning a suit of armour. From the suffragettes campaign for (some) women’s right to vote, to the different positions people took during the lesbian sex wars, fashion has always been wielded in the battle for rights. Fashion was a means of putting theory to action, like the androgynous “dyke uniform” meant to remove the “materially manifested gender hierarchy” (182). Medhurst also shows how t-shirts on dyke bodies are more than just a declarative statement, but a record of how lesbians made spaces for ourselves. Unsuitable weaves a powerful story of a lesbian fashion past that leaves readers hopeful for the future.

Gabe 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.