Dragstripping: Poems
Jan Beatty
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024, 112 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Jan Beatty’s Dragstripping explores identity, trauma, and resilience interwoven with self-discovery. The journey begins with “Sanctified,” a homage to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, setting the frank tone of the collection in her description of the nightclub scene: “real is real / that in the nightclub wailing and the strap-on guitars / there’s no happy ending / just the blues shouters / scorching / sanctified.” From there, she dives into what the back cover deems “the ecstatic after violence.”

Beatty’s Dragstripping draws on several meanings of drag and stripping, particularly concerning identity, the self, and body, while drawing on the imagery of drag racing. A dragstrip is a 402.33-meter stretch where races take place with burnt-out tires peeling toward the finish. In the poem “Drag,” Beatty thrusts readers into the depths of her childhood trauma, reviewing the moments where familial bonds frayed and her selfhood forged amidst adversity. She describes her time in an orphanage, the complicated relationship with her mother, and how families don’t make sense, given her life experiences, saying, “my heart’s dragstripped / from the shredded tires of predators.” Despite the trauma’s lingering, visible effects, she’s resilient. She challenges the reader to “throw the red flag down” and watch her overcome all expectations in the face of life’s challenges as she flies down the track towards the finish line.

Early in the collection lies “Dragstripping,” a reflection on desire and self-discovery, which I consider the heart of the collection thematically. This piece plays into “drag” and “stripping” in a way that may be more familiar to queer folks less keen on cars. Beatty writes about their experiences with a stripper and the complication of (what I perceived to be) gender. She says, “I couldn’t even say what she had / but I wanted it.” In the poem’s conclusion, Beatty comes to understand and explain finding exactly what she wanted. In this poem, the author navigates the complexities of desire and longing, focusing on the divided self.

The divided self is a recurring theme within Dragstripping, and the author passionately celebrates what she often calls the “split.” “Some people say that half isn’t anything / but it will drive an ocean back / to the center,” she notes. In “Scarline,” she further confronts the fractured nature of her identity. Yet, amidst the fractures, there is a fierce determination to reclaim agency and autonomy. In “I Ran into Water,” Beatty grapples with the confines of the body, seeking liberation in defiance of societal norms. The imagery of “striker boots” and “heel irons” speaks to a defiant spirit, unapologetically carving out space in a world that seeks to confine and define.

Dragstripping is a testament to poetry’s power to excavate the depths of human experience. Beatty’s work invites readers to witness the complexities of identity and resilience after trauma.

Allison Quinlan (they/she) volunteers for Sinister Wisdom. They manage a nonprofit in the UK and ghostwrite part-time. Their research appears in The Journal of Intersectional Social Justice, and their ghostwriting appears in The Independent, Solicitors Journal, and City A.M.

The Burning Key: New & Selected Poems (1973-2023)
Beatrix Gates
Thera Books, 2023, 300 pages
$22.95

Reviewed by Laura Gibbs

In The Burning Key: New & Selected Poems (1973-2023), Beatrix Gates offers an enchantingly diverse collection of poems, both published and new to the presses. Despite their vast temporal and thematic differences, all of the poems presented here share a striking sense of emotional honesty.

This edition of new and selected poems paints an intricate and intimate portrait of Gates’s admirable poetic career. As well as the collections published as part of The Burning Key, Gates’s work has appeared in journals such as Sinister Wisdom and The Kenyon Review and anthologized in Gay & Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (St. Martin’s, 1988), The World in US: Lesbian & Gay Poetry of the Next Wave (St. Martin’s, 2000), and Things Shaped in Passing: More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, 1995). By including poems written from 1973 to 2023, The Burning Key offers a detailed and thoughtful sense of Gates’s poetic journey. The collection provides us with intense and distilled snapshots of moments along this journey, from the haunting strangeness of Shooting at Night (1980) to the accepting resignation of a constantly changing nature in desire lines (2020). The collection comes to feel like a museum of a life–its artifacts are displayed with precise curatorial care so as to best reflect the visionary wisdom that blazes through even Gates’s shortest poems.

One of the most arresting sections of The Burning Key is the New & Reclaimed Poems. These previously unseen or revised poems are notable for their refreshing sense of vitality. The poem “Sunspots,” for example, has a visceral effect on the reader through its unusual lineation and rich soundscape. “Outpost” is another standout from this section, with its playful prosodic construction and breathlessly quick movement.

The poems included from Gates’s 1998 collection In the Open provide some of the most emotionally complex and lyrically challenging moments of The Burning Key. The poem “Cut Scenes” details intense feelings of loss interspersed with an appreciative recognition of the beauty of the natural world around the speaker. “Flowing Out, Away,” possibly my favourite poem in The Burning Key, provides a moment of exquisite stillness and minute reflection, as “[t]he wicker chair / becomes the one who feels / no love and shines hard / through the white paint.”

Another benefit of the vastness of the temporal selection provided in The Burning Key is that it allows us to see developments as well as to make connections across Gates’s poetic career. The formal experiments of the 2006 collection Ten Minutes, for example, where Gates consistently tries her hand at the prose poem, can be connected to her playfulness with form in desire lines, where the poem’s attention to seasonality and transience is reflected in its terse lines and white space spread over multiple pages.

Overall, Gates’s The Burning Key is a fitting celebration of an illustrious poetic career. The collection is a testament to Gates’s visionary verse, her commitment to exposing painful truths, and offering hope through resistance.

Laura Gibbs is a former Sinister Wisdom intern and master’s student based in Scotland. Her poetry has been published in Ink Sweat & Tears, and The Gentian. Her hobbies include spending all her money in bookstores and sitting by the sea. You can follow her on Instagram @lauramusing.

Cities of Women
Kathleen B. Jones
Keylight Books, 2024, 288 pages
$16.99

Reviewed by Dot Persica

Cities of Women by Kathleen B. Jones begins with a beautiful premise: it is a book dedicated to all the women artists who have been made invisible. Her love for and commitment to historic lesbians is clear and indubitable from the very beginning, and it shapes her narration.

Jones has much in common with Verity Frazier, the protagonist—a disillusioned academic whose curiosity is rekindled by Christine de Pizan, or rather by the suspicion that the hand responsible for the artwork in her manuscripts may have belonged to a woman artist called Anastasia. This idea propels a journey in search of the truth (as a native Italian speaker, the choice to name her Verity, veritas, is a little bit on the nose, but I imagine for readers who aren’t accustomed to Latinisms this is more subtle), as Verity is dying to unearth tangible proof of her theory.

What counts as fact is open to question—Verity speaks these words to her ex, Regina, with whom she has a strange (alas normal in lesbian terms) friendship. The incessant search for the real truth behind the accepted, dogmatic “truth” defines this book and the queer experience: what are we if not love’s archaeologists, tirelessly digging for proof that we aren’t the first or the only people to have loved the way we love, in the face of the world telling us that we are solitary exceptions?

Some descriptions of Verity’s amazement when interacting with valuable artifacts during her research reminded me of my experience at the Lesbian Herstory Archives—to touch the texture of the past, as Kathleen B. Jones says, provides a closeness to the subject that just can’t compare to simply reading about it, and the author succeeds in describing it as an almost religious experience.

Readers are accompanied back and forth between Verity’s present day and Christine’s late medieval Europe, both studded with political considerations about two eras that at first glance couldn’t seem more different but have much in common, touching on modern gentrification and its predecessors, the ever-present corruption of Church and State, and misogyny. The narration spans multiple characters’ points of view: an ambitious choice which is definitely called for in a book like this, though it’s not always executed smoothly.

To me, the author seemed more comfortable and truthful when writing in heightened language, leaving me with a feeling that she was holding back, almost restraining herself when writing in a more modern style. This made me yearn to be catapulted back into the thirteenth century.

Altogether, I thought the concept was wonderful, though very difficult to concretize.

I did not think it was unrealistic for Verity to encounter someone with the same name as the woman she was researching: Anastasia. As a lesbian whose existence is constantly altered by unbelievable coincidences, and who has observed the same in her lesbian friends’ lives, I found this a perfectly accurate, reasonable, and frankly quite brilliant form of representation.

As lesbians, every event in our existence is somehow brought on by strange forces we can’t define, and maybe it’s none other than our Lesbian Ancestors having their way with our little lives. I think this book captures that.

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

Rainbow Black
Maggie Thrash
Harper Perennial, 2024, 416 pages
$18.99

Reviewed by Catherine Horowitz

Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash is a riveting thriller that blends dark comedy, romance, and murder mystery. It is mostly set in the summer of 1990, when Lacey, a middle schooler living on a farm in New Hampshire, and her parents, who run a daycare from their home, become caught up in the Satanic Panic sweeping the nation. Her parents are arrested and accused of a number of fictionalized crimes, mostly Satanic child abuse rituals. As her family’s situation worsens inside and outside the courtroom, Lacey’s life spirals further out of control, pushing her to make decisions that will follow her far into the future.

Rainbow Black is wildly gripping and always entertaining despite its dark themes. As a reader, you know it’s not going to end well, largely because the book is told from a retrospective point of view, with narration from an older version of Lacey, who alludes to future events. Despite this looming sense of doom, Thrash always keeps you on the edge of your seat.

The book is often over-the-top and sometimes even absurd, mirroring the pulpy, mind-numbing entertainment that it often discusses. During the summer of their parents’ trial, Lacey and her older sister watch Days of Our Lives religiously, becoming increasingly drawn in as the plot becomes more and more ridiculous and outlandish. This provides a mind-numbing escape from the real world for them and mirrors their own lives, which are quickly becoming equally unbelievable.

This absurdity is why the book works, excessive as it may be. As Lacey watches fever dream-esque Kool-Aid commercials and thinks, “No wonder [her parents’ students] were having psychotic delusions,” newspapers write sensationalist headlines about her family that are equally outlandish. Her lawyer argues that the hedonism and consumerism of the late twentieth century, especially in the media, both make people’s lives worse and cause them to expect outrageous entertainment in real life, too. The book serves as another statement on entertainment and media and how they can blur the lines between authenticity and fiction.

Woven within the twists and turns of the book are the complex discussions of queer identity, sex, love, family, and other more serious topics. Perhaps, most importantly, it is a moving criticism of the American justice system, painting a picture that feels all too real of how it can hurt people by dragging them into false narratives.

At its core, Rainbow Black succeeds because its protagonist, Lacey, is a compelling character whose thoughts and feelings consistently feel vivid, earnest, and true. Despite knowing how things will end, you can’t help but hope for her to end up all right. The love story in the book’s second half also provides a surprising respite from its dark themes, ultimately becoming a central force that keeps its protagonists going. This all makes for an enthralling story that is, at its core, about love, relationships, and a quest to stay oneself in the midst of uncontrollable chaos.

Catherine Horowitz is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C. She earned a B.A. in English and Jewish Studies from Oberlin College. You can find her other work in Bright Wall/Dark Room, New Voices, and the Jewish Women’s Archive.

When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold
Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes
Coffee House Press, 2022, 256 pages
$16.95

Reviewed by Henri Bensussen

Alia Trabucco Zerán grew up in Chile and decided at a young age to be a lawyer. She graduated from law school in spite of the barriers against women. She also knew she wanted to write. With a Fulbright scholarship, she earned a master’s at NYU in creative writing in Spanish. Her first book, a novel, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019 and was translated into seven languages. In When Women Kill, she searches for facts but, along the way, explores alternative forms of fiction.

Delving into the lives of four Chilean women who committed murder, she researches old files and any other sources that provide the clues she’s looking for. She discovers how these women were portrayed by the press, quotes their statements, considers their motivations, shows how their cases were presented to the court, and the scope of their verdicts and sentencing. Trabucco Zerán acts as a detective, uncovering clues and evidence long buried. She presents her findings to the reader as a story written from a feminist viewpoint. She brings in her own thoughts and experiences to link these stories, not only to their own time but to ours as well. It was as entertaining and informative as reading a literary, engaging mystery. Like a good mystery, each woman’s story ends with a surprise.

Trabucco Zerán began this project wanting to know how these women were “treated, viewed, construed, depicted.” Were their trials fair? What happened after being found guilty? She wants to retell their lives to a modern audience and try to make sense of their history. Murder is a common problem in Latin America, she says, so she was surprised that when she talked to people about her project, she was often misunderstood. It was “easier for people to imagine a dead woman, than a woman prepared to kill.”

Women killing doesn’t happen. “For a man. . . violence even helps confirm his masculinity.” To remember women who dare to be bad is a “task of feminism.” She wants to “expand accepted ideas to include men who don’t base their masculinity on violence and women who express rage without having themselves portrayed as somehow less human.”

She selects four women of the twentieth century whose acts incited the most extreme reactions in Chilean society and draws parallels between them and feminist history. None of these women were executed; they served relatively short times in jail or prison. Why? As Trabucco Zerán realizes, if a woman is less than human, then she is incapable of the kind of violent acts that are done by men. Each of the women described in this book was sentenced to death or long prison terms by lower courts but pardoned or given shorter sentences at top-level ones.

In 1916, aligned with the first wave of feminism, Corina Rojas hired a man to murder her husband. Accused of adultery as well as murder, a “double transgression against both the law and her gender,” the newspapers turn it into an act of love and passion. Small chapbooks are published that change Rojas from a criminal into “any old woman who now laments her crime.” A movie is made based on these stories, but censors do not allow its showing; a movie about a woman transgressor—it would not reflect well on Chile. Her lawyer appeals to the President of Chile to spare her life. And so, it is spared; she is freed after six years in jail.

In 1923, news vendor Rosa Faúndez Cavieres slaughtered her lover, which raised fears about women who worked, especially in a man’s job. Faúndez Cavieres was defended as a “defective woman and in no way comparable to. . . docile, feminine wives.” Discovering her husband had given her week’s wages to his mistress, she literally wrings his neck as he lies in a drunken stupor. She cuts up his body and drops pieces along a river. The court judged it a case of jealousy and sent her to a women’s prison staffed by nuns for twelve years. While there, she incites a riot when denied a cup of coffee. Seven decades later, she “reappears as The Lady Ripper” in a play, The History of Blood, that echoes the killings that happened under the military regime that overthrew Salvador Allende. “Lady Ripper is no longer the feared masculine killer of 1923. . . but instead the equally terrifying femme fatale.”

In 1955, when women won the right to vote, the writer María Carolina Geel shot the man who wanted to marry her after they ordered tea and cake at a popular hotel. She had not planned it, she says, she herself felt unhappy. She admits to the murder but refuses to provide a motive, she refuses to answer the question posed by the court: “Who are you?” Doctors and psychiatrists can’t agree on a motive. Her lawyer presents it as hysteria, a momentary madness. About to be freed, she publishes a story about jailed women-loving women. She wants to control her story, writes Trabucco Zerán, and not be described as “mad.” Amid the response to the story, the Court of Appeals sentences her to three years in prison. A letter from Gabriela Mistral, Chile’s Nobel prize winner, asks that Geel be pardoned, and she is. Geel spends only one year in jail.

In 1963, the “decade of women’s sexual liberation,” María Teresa Alfaro, a servant and nursemaid to three children, poisons them and their grandmother because she herself was not allowed to marry and had been forced to endure abortions. She was angry. The judge would not accept that a servant could be angry at her employer and sentenced her to death for the act of jealousy. The Court of Appeals reduced that to nineteen years in prison; she was released for good behavior after ten.

Trabucco Zerán points out that newspapers and photographs supported the courts in their attempt to “chasten. . . the insubordinate woman.” Judges didn’t want to turn women killers into martyrs or saints by putting them in front of a firing squad. She calls us to “incorporate the disobedient woman into our history.” Female violence requires that we question gender norms, the “invisible gender laws that equate femininity with weakness and submission.”

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.

Blessed Water: A Sister Holiday Mystery
Margot Douaihy
Zando, Gillian Flynn Books, 2024, 288 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Roberta Arnold

Punk rocker nun sleuth Sister Holiday is on the case again in this brilliant sequel to Scorched Earth. Blessed Water is rife with fluid language and water imagery; one dead priest is fished out of the Mississippi, and the ominous photo of another missing priest slides under the door in a polaroid. Sister Holiday and her lead-footed ex-fire inspector partner, Magnolia Riveaux, snake their way over turbulent floodwaters to find Father Nathan, the quiet Black priest who, like Sister Holiday, can’t get over the loss of his mother. Douaihy is an accomplished poet with four published books of poetry under her belt, and she unfurls sentences with life lessons through language that ranges from the sensate to the sublime.

Sister Holiday’s partner, Riveaux, wears mom jeans and a tight ponytail and has recently rid herself of a white guy–and a pill addiction acquired from a broken back. Sister Holiday joined the Parish school and convent to find redemption from the sins of her past–a past that includes the unforgivable in her mind. She finds poetic justice poking at barbaric hierarchical structures to see what shakes out. Holiday and Riveaux both have an unusual style reserved for those who live on the margins and know how to look in the places between things–a gap or crevice more easily seen by those who live outside the norm: a haunted lesbian nun covered in tattoo ink and a beautifully brazen Black ex-cop who embraces the little things in life that inspire awe.

While not fitting into any prescribed family model, Sister Holiday paradoxically daydreams about growing old with her one true love, Nina. In the first Sister Holiday book, love-making between the two exploded off the pages with unbound lesbian desire. Holiday’s past resurfaces in Blessed Water through the character of her brother, who turns up unexpectedly–the Moose to her Goose, two nicknames defined by the symbiosis of their childhood play. One-liners spark in flinty propulsion and invariably move the story along or toss it up in the air, delivering devil-may-care chutzpah to the saints and sinners of New Orleans.

In the acknowledgements, Douaihy recognizes the harm done by the Catholic church and colonialist rule. Douaihy’s writing takes its redemption with the strident knowledge that two opposing things simultaneously can be true, similar to a marginalized lesbian finding redemption in Catholicism. The stories and writing offer up pictures of life as vehicles of insight, wisdom, and humor not to be missed.

“My insides churned. Riveaux and I walked back to the truck to the soundtrack of Riveaux’s cane and my muttering. Hail Mary, full of Grace. Let the afterlife be a lesbian separatist commune. Amen.”

Roberta Arnold is a Sinister Wisdom board member and volunteer who reads and writes and walks in awe of nature every day. She lives in the mountains of SW Virginia near to her sister, her dog, and her cat, none of whom really belong to her.

Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s-1990s
Bettina Aptheker
Routledge, 2022, 270 pages
$49.99

Reviewed by Julia M. Allen

In an elegant, seamless fusion of memoir, oral history, and archival research, Bettina Aptheker offers us and future generations the gift of our history. Perhaps we recognize the names of Lorraine Hansberry, Eleanor Flexner, or Harry Hay. But how much do we know of the multidimensionality of their lives? And why have we probably never heard of the accomplishments of Betty Millard, Maud Russell, David Graham DuBois, or Victoria Mercado?

As she narrates these lives, Aptheker extols all that they achieved through their devotion to anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and feminist projects through the Communist Left—Lorraine Hansberry’s plays that contain echoes of her studies with W.E.B. DuBois at the Communist Party-supported Jefferson School; Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle that grew from the syllabus that she constructed for the same school; Harry Hay’s courageous founding of the first gay rights organization, the Mattachine Society, based on the Communist theory of a “historically oppressed cultural minority.” She also reveals and celebrates the partnerships that sustained these remarkable women and men.

At the same time, she mourns the damage done and the losses caused by the mid-century insistence on silence, a silence that was embraced and enforced by the Communist Party as well as by almost all legal and medical authorities. In some cases, the closets are so deep and the closet doors so tightly closed that she can only speculate on the pain contained therein. In other cases, she quotes from letters and diaries attesting to the range of injuries. She puzzles over the party’s unusually long failure to understand and include a range of emotional and sexual expressions among members. Beginning in 1938, some members were deliberately expelled on the basis of homosexuality; others chose to leave for a variety of reasons, some unable to continue living “under deep cover.” Aptheker shares her own years-long struggle to maintain both her fidelity to the social justice work of the Communist Party and her awareness of her attraction to women, a struggle that finally ended when she left the party—though not her work for social justice—and began to build her life with her partner Kate.

Communists in Closets bears reading more than once to absorb all that it has to offer. That said, Routledge has apparently decided to jettison their copy editors, a disrespectful move that has made the reading experience unnecessarily difficult. Future researchers will have to be aware, for example, that if they want more information on the McCarran Act, they will not find it under “McCarren Act.” They may also wish, as I did, that the book included a bibliography and a separate listing of archives consulted.

Such wishes notwithstanding, Communists in Closets is a mind and heart-opening gift from a brilliant scholar, providing a solid foundation for future research with which we can continue to build a more inclusive history.

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.

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.