“Nelly & Nadine,” 2022, 1h 32m
Directed by Magnus Gertten

Reviewed by Emily L. Quint Freeman
© March 2024

Almost Lost Forever: A True Story of Love and Survival

When the extraordinary Swedish documentary “Nelly & Nadine,” directed by Magnus Gertten, was released in 2022, it was featured in over 100 festivals and received more than 20 international awards, mainly in Europe. Thankfully in the US, it is now widely available on various streaming services. For me, it was one of those films that stays with you, makes you think, makes you remember, makes you well up with tears.

“Nelly & Nadine” is a true story about two women who became lovers at the most harrowing place and time—a concentration camp during WWII. Somehow, they survived. If it weren’t for a benevolent granddaughter named Sylvie, their story would have been lost.

This documentary spoke to the heart of my own struggles and experiences as a lesbian of Jewish heritage. As a child, I knew my family’s immigrant story, how they crammed onto ships headed to America from eastern Europe during the early 20th century. Those that stayed behind never visited us, their lives passed from view.

I was over sixty when I first visited Prague and went to the historic Jewish cemetery. Written on a memorial wall were the family names of Jews who were transported and killed at the Terezin concentration camp. My eyes scrolled down the lengthy list and stopped short at one name: Rappaport, the family name of my mother’s father. I gasped; an icy chill went down my spine. If I hadn’t gone to that old graveyard, their fate would have been lost to me.

“Nelly & Nadine” begins at a remote farmhouse in Northern France.

The elderly Sylvie goes to the attic and opens dusty boxes, which contain her dead grandmother’s diary, letters, photographs, and home movies. She and her husband became the custodian of the boxes after her mother’s death. They faithfully kept them for many decades, as Sylvie had fond memories of her grandmother, Nelly Mousset-Vos (1906-1987), who had been an opera singer of considerable talent.

All Sylvie knew of Nelly was the kind, gray-haired woman with the wonderful voice who came to spend Christmas holidays with her French family, traveling all the way from her home in Caracas, Venezuela. After the end of WWII, Nelly moved there with a woman named Nadine. Sylvie was told that Nadine was just her grandmother’s friend and housemate.

At some point, Sylvie was curious; and in one box, she found Nelly’s diary. She read only a few lines before it was too painful for her to continue. Her grandmother never spoke to any family member about her two years in various Nazi concentration camps, but there it was all laid out in words. Finally, she dared to go further, and what she found was astounding.

Sylvie decided to share Nelly’s archive, so this documentary could be made. Researchers, historical recordkeepers, and friends of Nelly and Nadine helped to flesh out their true story. As the story was unearthed bit by bit, Sylvie participated in the key interviews and was shown the documents. She came to appreciate her grandmother not only as a remarkable person, but also as a hero of France.

In the 1930s, Sylvie knew that Nelly performed in cities all over Europe, and that she had two children (her marriage ended in divorce). She learned that after the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, her grandmother joined the Resistance as part of a spy ring. In 1943, Nelly was arrested in Paris by the Gestapo and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The prisoners were forced to do hard labor under terrible conditions; if they couldn’t, they were killed.

Old photographs and home movies revealed what the mysterious Nadine looked like. She was a tall, elegant figure with short hair, often dressed in trousers, a shirt and tie. Born in Madrid, Nadine Hwang (1902-1972) was the daughter of a high-ranking Chinese diplomat and a Belgian mother. She was educated in multiple languages. Nadine moved to Paris in 1933 and became part of the feminist/lesbian circle around Natalie Barney (1876-1972). A playwright, poet and novelist, Barney hosted a salon of notable artists and writers at her Left Bank home. Nadine became Barney’s chauffeur and one of her casual women lovers. Nelly’s memoir stated that Nadine helped at-risk people escape from Occupied France to Spain, which led to her arrest and transportation to Ravensbrück in May 1944.

After Nelly and Nadine met in the camp, their relationship became intimate and passionate; and against all odds, their love for each other kept them alive. They were separated when Nelly was later transported to the notorious Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Forced labor in the stone quarry usually meant death, and Nelly was close to the edge at this camp. Her intense memories of Nadine kept her going.

The movie shows a poignant clip of a film taken in 1945 when a group of liberated prisoners from Ravensbrück arrived in Sweden. You see the faces of the survivors deliriously happy to be alive and start their recovery. Nadine was in that crowd. Hers was the only sad, tense face. At the time, no one understood the reason. Nadine was thinking of Nelly. Was she alive or dead?

By some miracle, Nelly had survived, and they found each other again. After the war, what followed was the story of so many gay men and women before the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. I know because I was around then.

1965. I was a sophomore at UC Berkeley when I phoned my father from the dorm. I told him that I wasn’t returning home for the summer. I’d met someone I wanted to be with, someone I loved. Her name was Caitlin. My father exploded, calling me a child, an infatuated fool. He told me to come home, or all financial support would end. I went with Caitlin, and my life became one of desperate struggle to stay in school and graduate. But I did.

The price of being honest and true to oneself was so high that gay people had to make heartrending decisions. Some had secret lovers under the cover of a straight marriage. For career and paycheck, one’s real private life wasn’t ever spoken about at work. Coming out meant stiff societal consequences (even criminal in the case of men). On the streets, fluid gender or flamboyant clothes raised the risk of being beaten or killed. Despite the passage of gay marriage and wider acceptance, it’s still tough out there for so many.

Nelly and Nadine were determined to live free and honest lives. Staying in Europe was too painful after what they experienced in the camps and too close to Nelly’s family. They picked Caracas, Venezuela -- it was sunny and inexpensive with available jobs for educated, multilingual Europeans. The home movies showed them relaxing and entertaining their queer friends. They lived as partners until Nadine died in 1972.

Especially moving was the way Nadine filmed Nelly at their Caracas apartment. She caught Nelly deep in her own thoughts. Her face reflected a profound inner sadness, as her time in the camps could never be forgotten. One can only imagine that those memories were crushing and tragic.

But she had Nadine, and they endured those memories together, always together. Love is love, that’s all and that's enough.


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

The Weight of Survival
Tina Biello
Caitlin Press, 2024, 72 pages
$20.00

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

Language, Smell, & Memory: Tools for Surviving Grief

Tina Biello’s The Weight of Survival tells the story of her Italian immigrant upbringing through free verse and prose poems, inviting the reader to experience her family’s village of Casacalenda. The collection is primarily, and poignantly, a love letter to her ancestry, her mother country, and her childhood home of British Columbia. Biello brings us along on her odyssey of remembrance—remembrance of herself, her family, and, of course, Casacalenda. In combination with her inclusion of folklore curses and proverbs as well as treating time as a transcendent force, Biello successfully writes grief as a form of survival.

Biello begins The Weight of Survival with an author’s note about language, or more specifically, the dialetto di Casacalenda, or, the dialect of Casacalenda. Biello creates a thread of her mother tongue throughout the collection that is not only functional and culturally significant, but lends itself to the powerlessness of grief in poems like “Say Good-Bye” and “The Call.” In the latter, Biello writes about her mother’s death. She translates her father’s words from dialetto di Casacalenda: “our language digs gardens, builds sheds, makes wine” (33). In contrast with her mother’s death, it is her mother’s dialect that continuously creates—it is a language that survives.

Beyond her use of language to portray grief, Biello employs smell and mortality to reclaim memory. Biello primarily uses scent as an agent for remembrance in poems such as “My Death,” “Last Poem about My Mother,” and “On the Last Day of the World.” Biello’s craft is portrayed in her vivid employment of smell to evoke powerful memories in contrast to her mother’s Alzheimer’s. She writes, “I will make sugo, make sure our home / smells like my mother’s kitchen. / Assuming she will be greeting me, / I will create an altar” (13). Smell is an extremely powerful tool for the brain in communicating memory, especially grief. Although her mom’s memory is deteriorating, the power of smell is not, and the memories it produces do not fade either.

Although lesbianism is not the primary theme of The Weight of Survival, Sinister Wisdom readers will particularly enjoy “She Brought Home Women,” “Ode to Rosetta,” and “Queer Dear.” The elements explored above such as memory, language, and grief are beautifully drawn out in these poems.

Biello’s storytelling shines in her prose poems, but their emotional depth is often lost. For example, “Lucia” beautifully captures the dissonance of being native to Canada but not feeling truly at home because of the dreary weather (24). Casacalenda, on the other hand, has bright and vibrant weather, which is more akin to the connotation of her middle name, Lucia. “The Corner Store” is a similar prose poem and includes experimentation with form: Biello includes a recipe for àglie e òglie (30). These poems, although they lack a sense of completeness and depth like the rest of the collection, are nevertheless enjoyable and interesting.

The close of the collection is somber yet beautiful, perfectly showcasing Biello’s thematic genius. “His Ashes” and “Silence” are triumphs. She reminds us that hope can be found through a reclaimed memory of loved ones, remembering that “the years have been long, but the loving good” (66). The Weight of Survival is not a collection to miss.


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.

Next Time You Come Home
Lisa Dordal and Milly Dordal
Black Lawrence Press, 2023, 120 pages
$19.95

Reviewed by Yeva Johnson

Next Time You Come Home by Lisa Dordal and Milly Dordal is a beautiful collection that transforms a mother and daughter’s correspondence into a lyrical tour de force on grief and connection while spotlighting big and tender moments of the last part of the twentieth century. The beautiful cover artwork subtly reinforces the layers of meaning within many of the poems.

Next Time You Come Home is organized in two parts. Part I serves as a contextualizing introduction to the poems that follow, which are based on letters from Lisa’s mother that Lisa rediscovers twenty years after Milly’s death. The reader is informed that Milly was an alcoholic who had experienced multiple losses due to life’s vicissitudes. Milly and Lisa corresponded extensively in the 1980s and 1990s so that Milly’s habit of writing the date and time of each letter shines a new light, showing that the daytime mother, who was a respected community leader, and the nighttime mother, under the influence of alcohol, were more closely related than Lisa realized. In the process of typing up Milly Dordal’s letters, Lisa Dordal performed what she described as “a sculpting exercise” and a “distillation process” to transform her mother’s written communication into a poetic form between letters and poems that elucidate the themes she shares with us—including the natural world, grief and loss, racism, sexism, and substance use disorders—while also capturing her mother’s voice so that we, too, can meet this complex woman who sacrificed her dream of being a writer to raise four children.

Part II, called “Not This, Not That,” comprises the letters as poems. All the poem titles refer simply to the month and year they were originally composed, as Lisa has already prepared us for the gaps in the letters that serve as a “lovely metaphor for” her “relationship with and understanding of” her mother. The poems cover the time period during and after Lisa came out to her mother as a lesbian, so that lines such as “I would be delighted if, someday, you had a special friend, / and we could meet her” from March of 1996 demonstrate the tender way a mother shows her love for her queer daughter. Lisa deftly carries on her mother’s quirky sense of humor with lines like “How are your plants doing? / Mine are experiencing strange deaths” and “It rained many inches on Friday and Saturday – / if it had been snow, it would have been awful. / Instead it was only depressing.” One wonders if Milly intended a joke with “Play Reading is tonight: Awake and Sing by Clifford Odets. / It’s about a dysfunctional family. Dad has a role”.

Lisa privileges readers with a view of this intimate relationship that overlapped by the thirty-six years while they were both alive in lines like “…You were 10 when I started drinking, / maybe 9. I’ve put you through a lot of pain” and “Draw me a picture of your Oak chairs, so I can picture you / sitting, writing, reading in them –.” Milly and Lisa Dordal share their blend of letter poems with everyday life details that make them relatable to readers today, such as when they write, “we should be able to have a good time – / if we avoid discussing politics or evolution. / Maybe we can reminisce about the 50s” and “I’m sure the cookies will be crumbs, / but they were sent with love.” There are many other poems and many lines that are a pleasure to read and can be savored again and again.

Lisa Dordal honored her mother by making her a coauthor of the collection. These lines from a February 1990 poem sum up my admiration for this collection and this mother-daughter poetry duo: “I love the ‘Broken Pitcher’ notecard you sent. / The woman in the painting reminds me of you (and me).” Make Next Time You Come Home a part of your poetry library for a ready source of comfort and a reflection on love and loss.


Yeva Johnson, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and musician whose work appears in Bellingham Review, Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color Anthology, Sinister Wisdom, Yemassee, and elsewhere, explores interlocking caste systems and possibilities for human co-existence in our biosphere. Her debut poetry chapbook, Analog Poet Blues, is available at Black Lawrence Press.

Disclosure: Nomadic Press published Yeva Johnson’s debut chapbook, Analog Poet Blues, in 2023; Nomadic Press stopped operations the same month that Analog Poet Blues was released. Black Lawrence Press is now the publisher of Analog Poet Blues. The review author, Yeva Johnson, is also published by the publisher of Lisa Dordal’s book.

The Price of a Small Hot Fire
E.F. Schraeder
Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2023, 106 pages
$13.95

Reviewed by Yeva Johnson

I looked forward to reading E.F. Schraeder’s The Price of a Small Hot Fire, but when I read the author’s note, I stopped short. Horror poetry gives me pause. I love poetry, but I am one of those people who do not like horror, whether in film or written variety. I am haunted for years after any encounter with this artistic form, so I have been careful to curate and limit my exposures. While intellectually I knew that, as E.F. Schraeder says, “Horror poetry, like other horror media, provides a path to explore what frightens us with a distance that affords safety,” I am always spooked because I understand all too well that “Whether understated or blood-soaked, a horror poet’s personal take and artistic license may yield an intensity of pitch or punch that offers unusual or uncomfortable discovery.” It was an act of bravery for me to dive into Schraeder’s poetic world without rules, where no topic was off limits. Luckily, my bravery was handsomely rewarded.

The Price of a Small Hot Fire is E.F. Schraeder’s first full-length poetry collection, and they supply us with a panoply of poems in various forms with interlocking and overlapping themes replete with images of spells, witches, knives, hearts, fires, lions, Frankenstein, Narnia, stones, bone, wind, water, and ash that underlie a queer feminist take on mothers, estrangement, trauma, and grief. In the poem “Postmarked From Nowhere,” Schraeder taps into the particular sources of fear that writers and poets experience when a mother character serves as a metaphor for how our lives are marked by others, in lines like “She inserted commas into adolescence / until I craved erasers and disappearing ink.” In “Confessions of an Avon Lady’s Daughter,” the mother says, “I feel naked without makeup,” but in this kindhearted portrait, this same mother, when asked by the speaker to teach them how, replies, “No. I don’t want you to feel like that.” The poet repeatedly shares the pain of trauma with lines like “sliced into muscle with weights and blades” and the heady lack of fear at “the sensuous rush / of standing on the edge of cliff,” so it is only fitting that in a later poem Schraeder gifts us with the antidotal line “In the garden, I plant the cure for everything” to assuage our tender nerve endings.

In another poem, the poet reminds us that a mother is not wholly a monster with the tender lines “I leapt over each sidewalk crack / my youth spent on checkerboard moves / in the chess of childhood / where I always lost.” But, this is a horror collection, and one of the most horrifying poems is “Necessary Tools for the Reinvention of a Relationship,” where Schraeder transforms everyday objects into suppliers of fear and danger, so that “One crystal vase” will forever terrify me. “Cherry Blossoms (Mourning A Distant Mother)” captures the essence of estrangement and loss: “No one else grieves what’s always been gone.” By the time the reader comes to the poem “Forgiveness Spell” they are ready to ponder all the dimensions of Schraeder’s question, “Is loss so different than love?” Schraeder never drifts into the overly sentimental, but rather weaves layers upon layers of meaning within and between lines that pack a punch.

Whether or not one is a fan of horror, poetry, both, or neither, The Price of a Small Hot Fire is well worth reading and reading again. This insightful collection of horror verse leaves us ruminating on every mother, every fire, every fear, every love, allowing us to reflect and so be nurtured by Schraeder’s work. Read The Price of a Small Hot Fire, and you will likely find yourself agreeing with E.F. Schraeder when they say “Life is full of poetry and horror. It’s up to any of us how closely we choose to look.”


Yeva Johnson, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and musician whose work appears in Bellingham Review, Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color Anthology, Sinister Wisdom, Yemassee, and elsewhere, explores interlocking caste systems and possibilities for human co-existence in our biosphere. Her debut poetry chapbook, Analog Poet Blues, is available at Black Lawrence Press.

Floating Bones
Rae Diamond
First Matter Press, 2023, 92 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Yeva Johnson

Rae Diamond’s Floating Bones is a magnificent multisensory experience fitting for this hybrid book of poetry, art, and essays. I invite any reader to enjoy it as I did from the first touch to the last page. To hold Floating Bones in your hands is a sensual pleasure, the velveteen surface of the front and back covers will caress your fingertips as you admire the intriguing cover art graced by the rib cage and spine of a skeleton with scattered butterflies at the entrance of an open door to a cloud-filled sky, while the back cover sports a smattering of even more lepidopters. Open the book and see that Rae Diamond has offered a multiplicity of their gifts as both poet/writer and artist. The poem “forward” tells us the author wrote these poems “without a home,” “when everywhere was a door,” and invites us to “come / in / come / in / come / in.”

I recommend you read this book for the first time as I did, from cover to cover, allowing you to enjoy the beautiful drawings of bones of various animals, body parts, and other objects that could be found at the seashore or that might drop from the sky. Rae Diamond’s exquisite illustrations are sometimes exact anatomical depictions of the natural world and at other times fanciful renderings of imagination on paper, like teeth with wings or butterfly wings that protrude from a backbone. Some of the bones are in shapes that may not be familiar, so it was fun to guess which part, animal, or object it might be. Diamond includes an index of illustrations in the extensive endnotes which provide correct answers to all the guesses.

Read the book again and you’ll notice that some of the poems complement the illustrations by mimicking their form and some of the illustrations seem to adorn the poems and inspire their lyric imagery. There are double delights in simply reading the book through visually to enjoy the artwork and then reading it again by looking at the book’s pictures while appreciating the shapes of the poems as well as how many poems have some words printed in faint gray ink. These turn out to be delicate poems-within-poems which Rae Diamond labels bone poems, also graciously indexed in the endnotes. They also included short lines that are crossed out and upside down on pages which serve as solemn meditations on home and underpin our understanding of the poems, essays, and art throughout the book.

You are now ready to read Floating Bones again with a focus on all the words and their layered meanings and the new words that Rae Diamond invents that add textures and rhythms, such as in the poem “windstepping” where you’ll find the gorgeous “here among this shimmerrhythm of frogs singing / for eggs to fructify a chorus of confirmation.” In “Enchanted telephone” enjoy lines like “at dusk deft bats / might / careen / through / echoecho / locating insects” as they drape the page like a delicate lace. Notice in “we will echolocate this moment” how Rae Diamond flows from line to line, accelerating until landing at a satisfying “k”. Read the book again, this time aloud, to understand how the sonic energy of Diamond’s work complements their art in both poetic and drawn forms. Floating Bones is filled with Rae Diamond’s compound words and phrases like “sunscorch,” “dogwag in boat,” “twilighthush,” “spiritshatter,” and “windstir” in the poem “wing through walls.” In “your head is opening” the whole poem becomes a pleasure for mouth and tongue as you read aloud lines like “a buzzbunch of bees / bumble dances the dust out / from under your diaphragm.”

Toward the end of Floating Bones, Rae Diamond includes an essay entitled “dialogues of belonging: the complicated act of taking up space on a finite planet” and the endnotes provide additional information about Diamond and her family and the themes of having a home, being without a home, and feeling at home and link these ideas with broader social issues such as affordable housing, the climate crisis, and land stewardship. Rae Diamond’s writing is so evocative you feel that you are part of the scene in poems like “end of summer,” or you feel that you can almost touch a feather or an artistic fish skeleton, detailed and beautifully decorated all at once. Read Floating Bones to yourself, enjoy the ripples over your vision. Read Floating Bones aloud and enjoy the ripples over your ears and tongue. Read Rae Diamond’s Floating Bones many times and be prepared to “linger / in / mystery” long after you’ve closed the book’s pages with a deeper understanding of what it means to be unhoused.


Yeva Johnson, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and musician whose work appears in Bellingham Review, Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color Anthology, Sinister Wisdom, Yemassee, and elsewhere, explores interlocking caste systems and possibilities for human co-existence in our biosphere. Her debut poetry chapbook, Analog Poet Blues, is available at Black Lawrence Press.