Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect
Koss
Diode Editions, 2024, 52 pages
$12.00

Reviewed by Jenny Wong

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss is a Lambda Literary Award Finalist that takes the gritty scuffs and shapes of life and condenses them into twenty-eight poems which challenge the reader to observe what happens in the aftermath, the retrospect, and beyond.

The poem “A Modern Highway of Death,” although it may not have intentionally been written to describe the collection, sums it up well: “The world, you see/and don’t, is in flux between / Connections and short circuits.”

Words sparkle and spark with color, painting surreal scenes that bring to life human moments through a queer lens. Although the chapbook’s title feels playful, the weight of grief, suicide, abuse, and other traumas weave its way throughout. Titles such as “Things to Do When an Abuser Dies” and “Flint Girl Handcuffed Along Dort Highway” forewarn of troubles to come. However, despite the darkness that unfolds within the boundaries of a page, Koss’ skill as a writer shines in what they choose to reveal and what is left obscured in the shadows. The language in this collection is both visual and visceral, blending the starkness of reality with a soft filter of the surreal. The collection never shies away from the truth of the experience, nor from the impacts of events that ripple and rebound into the current day.

There are several stunning list poems in the collection which is a form Koss adeptly uses to convey events, possibilities, and introspections. Listed items dialogue with each other, find humor in the aside, and use brevity to condense observation into its most potent form. One such example is the list poem “Ten Things to Remember ‘Bout Me When I’m Dead.” The first entry starts out swinging: “1. I was a victim more than once, but said no and no and no; I’m / the craggy boxing bitch, staggering through the bloodstream. / Dig my damn red lace-up boots, I wore them just for you.”

Peeking through the heaviness, Koss still manages to show a world of color and humor. Visuals dazzle and word choice challenges the reader to see something new in a scene that may or not be familiar. “A Dyke Cowgirl Takes Herself on a COVID Taco Bell Date,” sets the stage for a drive-thru encounter that Koss makes anything but mundane: “Hand a five to a large hairy man in glittery bunny ears fixed / to a plastic tiara, singing into his mask, hump dancing and / in-the-moment-happy. They work sixty hours with overtime / that inches them just out of the poverty bracket if you / discount health insurance.”

Throughout the collection, there are several poems with the word “Zuihitsu” appended between parentheses in their titles. Zuihitsu, which means “follow the brush,” is a genre in Japanese literature that focuses on the responses elicited by an environment. Koss shows us that although people and places can shape us, they do not define us. A person can choose to create their own colors and perceptions in order to transform past events into stories of survival, recovery, and an exploration of life itself.

Jenny Wong is a writer, traveler, and occasional business analyst. She is the author of Shiftings & Other Coordinates of Disorder (Pinhole Poetry, 2024) and resides in Canada near the Rocky Mountains where she makes short poetry films and plans her next adventures. Find her on X, bluesky, and instagram @jenwithwords.

Encounters for the Living and the Dead
Jameela F. Dallis
River River Books, 2025, 106 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

Encounters for the Living and the Dead is a first collection of poetry by Jameela F. Dallis. She opens this rich and fecund poetic exploration with an epigraph quoted from bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions: “No matter what has happened in our past, when we open our hearts to love we can live as if born again, not forgetting the past but seeing it in a new way, letting it live inside us in a new way” (hooks, 129). With this epigraph, the poet introduces us to the organic function of memory and the connection to our past as she both mourns and celebrates our ancestors, grandmothers, cousins, and friends. She continues: “Altarworks are poems for people who’ve passed on—some I’ve known and loved. I imagine the poems being a part of an altar thick with candles and melted wax like my own” (85).

The presence of death in life, appearing like a pearl inside an oyster, forms a recurrent theme in her work, as in her poem titled “Three of Swords”:

I remember smelling the sweat, the turpentine— / that scent that was always always reminding me that you would die. / That scent the shape of something rotten, maybe fecund, / but still something I wish I could walk into again— / its memory is something that resurrects / my worry for you and then dissolves (11).

An oyster appears in many of her poems as a symbol of the poet’s eternal love for the sea. For example, in her poem “See Me Now,” the poet describes the fortune she had to cross the ocean four times, to travel throughout Europe, and to dine on gourmet food in many countries. She relishes seafood as she feeds her imagery: “Himalayan black salt / and pink rare salmon swim into / the silver threads of memory” in “I, Origin” (19). Jameela writes of her insistent love for the food and memories of the sea: “Holding onto my oyster dreams / nowhere to be / released from weighty history I gather my dreams / sup at your banquet” in “Oyster Dreams” (38).

Ekphrastic verse pervades this lush collection. Jameela writes poems to celebrate the paintings of artists like Henri Matisse and Robert Motherwell. She devotes the entire section three to “Ekphrastic Encounters”—poems in tribute to the work of other artists from David Bowie to Helen Frankenthaler. In the Notes, she records:

Henri Matisse’s ‘Les Betes De La Mer (1950)’ inspires not only the eponymous poem but resonates throughout the entire second part. In what feels like kismet, in high school, I completed a master copy of Matisse’s work when I thought I’d become a professional visual artist one day. . . Thus, passionate love, heartbreak, cheekiness, and more research into marine life than I ever imagined imbue this. . . book (86).

This fine debut collection is presented with the blessing of poets—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Jaki Shelton Green, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Emilia Phillips, and Jameela’s “mentors, teachers, professors, advisors, family members, and benevolent ancestors. . .” (90). Gabrielle Calvocoressi has written about Dallis: “So few of us are willing to experience life fully if it means being confronted with our deepest hungers and the deep harms we have been forced to live through. So few of us can sit with the living and the dead with the kind of generosity that Dallis does, the deep curiosity, the love” (Praise).

The poet Jameela F. Dallis is a resident of Durham, North Carolina. Her publications include poetry, interviews, art criticism, and literary scholarship. Her work has appeared in prestigious journals such as Feminist Studies, Honey Literary, and The Fight and the Fiddle under the auspices of the Furious Flower Poetry Center. Jameela holds a B.A. in English from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College, she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in many literary and scholarly journals.

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

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And of her return to the States she writes:

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

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

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College, she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in many literary and scholarly journals.

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

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by Lya Hennel

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down?
Allison Blevins
Persea Books, 2024, 70 pages
$17.00

Reviewed by Pelaya Arapakis

Allison Blevins’s award-winning book Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? is a lyrical meditation on the effects of chronic illness, disability, and a spouse’s gender transition as experienced through the prism of a marriage. Following the daily lives of its central characters—Grim and Sergeant—Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? contemplates what it means to exist in a body among other bodies. Blevins’s hybrid narrative-in-vignettes defies conformity to a single genre, pushing and pulling between fragmented prose-poetry, fairytale, and auto-fiction, guiding us through difficult and deeply layered emotional terrains that are profound and heart-wrenching.

Masks figure prominently in Blevins’s work as a device to explore the multiplicity of identity. This thematic concern is first implied in the very epigraph of the text: “Under this mask another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces” (Claude Cahun). Soon after, we are introduced to Grim and Sergeant—personae of Blevins and her partner, respectively—as they navigate the world in bodies and identities that are in various states of flux. However, change is often accompanied by grief, and we bear witness to Grim, who mourns for the person she once was, the person she was before her illness, before “every moment [was] an accounting of pain” (61). Throughout this process, it becomes clear that identity is neither static nor singular, that “Grim is a character played by the woman she once was” (38). Here, identity is itself a mask—but not necessarily one that, when removed, unveils a definitive truth, but is instead a perpetual unfurling.

Throughout the narrative, Grim’s body is often rendered as a site of pain. Daily tasks become gruelling, “Grim tells the doctor, I want to stand long enough to make grilled cheese, want to walk the dark living room at night to check the children are breathing” (18). Still, Blevins speaks to the grounding force of the body. While “Grim often finds herself lost. . . Her body remains,” with its needs, desires, its state of simply being, binding her—binding us— to others: “we are not held together but bound to each other” (10). Grim is reminded of this visceral nature of embodiment in a medical waiting room, of “how we all do this strange moving together as marionettes. Like smelling armpits or ear wax or maybe dead skin squeezed from a tight black pore. Like remembering the weight of a past lover on your body. Like breaking apart or sewing together” (7). Yet, sometimes our needs conflict with those of people around us, and it is this very tension that Blevins captures with incredible nuance and poignancy. In a quarrel with the Sergeant, Grim asks what he needs, to which he responds, “I need you to need less from me” (41). Just as pain might course through Grim’s body, the quiet fracture of this confession reverberates throughout these pages.

Swirling between genres, Blevins weaves a gripping portrait of a marriage that is as devastating as it is tender. As the title suggests, Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? reminds us that embodiment is shared, messy, and ineluctable, and that our bodies—with all the joys, aches, and complexities they bring—are our ultimate homes, even as they collapse around us.

Pelaya Arapakis (she/her) is a musician, arts worker, and freelance writer based in Naarm/Melbourne.

The Unboxing of a Black Girl
Angela Shanté
Page Street YA, 2024, 160 pages
$18.99

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

Angela Shanté’s new poetry collection is subtitled “A Love Letter to Black Girls.” In these powerful poems, she confronts “Black Girls vs. The World.” She writes: “I want to live in a world where Black girls get to be free” (9). In the poet’s introduction, she confesses that “Poetry and experimental storytelling have always anchored me when the rainbow truly wasn’t enough,” paraphrasing the title of by Ntozake Shange’s 1975 play, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Shanté claims that she wrote the book that she always wanted to read—a book to be read out loud—full of choreopoems vivid in their articulation and poetic outcry.

The poet evokes an American history that has always exploited and abused Black people. The salve poured into the wounds suffered by Black women is found in their respect for inheritance, tradition, and legacy. She credits her own admiration for the elders who molded and shaped her during her childhood years as key to her survival. Her relationship with her mother and with her older sister, who assumed the maternal role when their mother was missing, became vital to the “unboxing” of Angela Shanté.

The poet writes of the “boxes,” or labels, used to define and classify Black people, especially ingrained into the psychology of young Black girls. In her poem “Floss (Verb),” she introduces the verb “to floss,” which means “to flaunt” in her own language. Through this word, she describes the economic boundaries that existed between herself, her sister, and the other children in the neighborhood whom she was told to call “the poor”:

“Having luxuries placed you in a tier above. I knew that if I had something I could flaunt over another person, the world would treat me a little nicer. Hold me a little gentler. So, allowance was a big get. It meant my big sister and I were a pair of the very few girls in our hood who had money to spend. Having extra was a big floss” (18).

The poet reveals that “some boxes are chosen for us” with the defined, restrictive, and established roles Black girls are forced to play by their family members who instill in them certain codes of behavior and language. Other “boxes” become part of the wider, even more insidious influence of false socialization caused by racial differences, economic stratification, and prejudice.

As I reviewed this poetry collection, I was drawn to the philosophy of James Baldwin in Begin Again—Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.’s series of timely essays on the life and works of the novelist and social critic. I began to consider the process of “unboxing” the self that Shanté describes in her poems. There are obvious similarities between this process of “unboxing” and the personal transformation Baldwin experienced through his work. Professor Glaude writes:

“Imagine as a child grappling with the hurtful words that say you’re ugly, he (Baldwin) intimates to Fern Marja Eckman, his first biographer. ‘You take your estimate of yourself from what the world says about you. I was always told that I was ugly. My father told me that. And everybody else. But mostly my father. So I believed it. Naturally. Until today I believed it’” (35).

The mission of Shanté’s work is to lay claim to and reinforce the beauty found in the Black family, in the Black body and mind, and within the landscapes of the neighborhoods in which we dwell. She writes in the poem, “The South Bronx”: “between the grime and litter / over burned buildings / and through smoke-filled highways / i can make out beauty” (79). This exemplifies the recurring theme of her poems, that there is inherent beauty in the lives of Black people that cannot be stifled, maligned, nor ignored. She convinces readers that we all need to step out of our boxes.

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program at Goddard College, she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar. She has published three poetry collections as well as two chapbooks of poetry. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Atlanta Review, Callaloo, Calyx, Chiron Review, Seneca Review, Tuskegee Review, World Literature Today, and many other literary and scholarly journals.

To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers
Edited by Rae Garringer
The University Press of Kentucky, 2025, 112 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Home is a complicated thing. For many queer folks from Appalachia, home is too often a place longed for, but which we know will never quite fully have us. This collection captures that tension well, and importantly amplifies the voices of Black, Indigenous, and other marginalised peoples in the collection of essays and poetry. Living in spaces that don’t always love you back means that too many queer people move through the world braced for violence.

The collection gets right into the gut punch of what survival looks like with “What You Should Know Before You Kill Me” by Brandon Sun Eagle Jent (2-3). Jent writes, “This body is but a wave in the ocean of me,” (2) an assertion that queer existence is something larger than the physical body, and not easily erased. Rayna Momen’s “They Say All Kinds Are Welcome Here” lays bare the reality for so many, particularly people of colour in these spaces: “yet these [country] roads to prosperity / are full of [shit] potholes and bigotry” (4). The collection definitely doesn’t ease you in—you understand the nuances of the author’s lived experience before you finish the first essay.

Lucien Darjeun Meadows continues the conversation, “And I can never ‘go home,’ not really, not completely, ever again” (12). So, the work presents a question to the reader: Where exactly do you go and what do you do when home is both a longing and a loss? What I left with is that it’s up to us to carve out a space and fight for a place to be. I understand that this should inspire in some ways, but reading this during the current political climate in the United States left me feeling a little disheartened at the reality that we’ll seemingly always have to fight just to be.

Every piece in the collection speaks to those questions of longing and belonging. hermelinda cortés writes about being Mexican-American in a space that doesn’t “claim” her and her choice to stay, rooted by something deeper than belonging in a traditional sense. Likewise, Momen’s “Growing up Black in Appalachia / made me want to fight and to flee / left me internalized and empowered / to live a double life / like Affrilachians learn to do” (26) echoes the complexity of existence as a marginalized person in Appalachia. Garringer also acknowledges the difficulty in addressing these questions of identity and belonging: “This, too, is a part of the place I call home. And not talking about these horrific truths is a way of protecting them, condoning them, even” (46).

It’s hard not to feel sad reading the collection, but there are also lovely moments of love and hope—not naive hope—but the kind that we struggle for and progress towards, even if it still feels disheartening to fight for it constantly. Rosenthal’s segment, “A Queer Place Called Home” (63-70) was the most comforting read in the work. It offered a glimpse of a future for queer life and love in Appalachia. I suppose the collection answers the questions the authors raise by showing that home might not necessarily be someplace to return to, but instead something to create. D. Stump writes, “We find meaning in all the places meaning calls to us. We find home in all the places that invite us to sit at the table and eat” (82).

In the final pages, Jent returns, telling readers that “this world loves me too” (83-84). I finished To Belong Here feeling exhausted and a little sad, but mostly grateful for the book and the voices it holds—an undeniable proof that we’re here, creating and continuing.

Allison Quinlan now feels more conflicted about missing home. They are a nonprofit manager and teacher currently living in Scotland (originally from rural Georgia, United States).

Reflections in a Rearview Mirror
Teya Schaffer
2025, 54 pages
$10.95

Reviewed by Judith Katz

Teya Schaffer’s short volume of prose and poetry begins with a piece called “Appreciations.” It’s a conversation between an unnamed narrator and a street woman she calls Valerie—aka the “dog lady”—that takes place as the two sit on a curb in San Francisco circa 1970 or 1980. As the two talk companionably about the Free Clinic, women’s land, and animal rights, they are interrupted not once but twice by a man who aggressively approaches and insults them, excoriating the narrator for her masculine appearance. Her friend Valerie ignores the man. Our narrator takes Valerie’s lead, and the man eventually goes away.

I read “Appreciations” decades ago in a journal called Common Lives/Lesbian Lives in issue number seven, Spring 1983 (65-68). It struck me then, as it strikes me now, as a vivid picture of that San Francisco street life. But it also strikes me as a vivid reminder that attacks—verbal and physical—on our queer bodies are not anything new.

Other stories in this slim collection explore difficult and important relationships. “A Letter to San Francisco” is a painful correspondence between a woman who finds her lesbian footing in San Francisco and her closeted, married lover, originally published in Sinister Wisdom: 31 Winter 1987 (67-71). “With Love, Lena” is an aging Holocaust survivor’s reminiscence of her secret lover in New York City on the occasion of her death. It is a powerful story about survival in all of its forms, and though it was first published in Sinister Wisdom: 29/30 The Tribe of Dina, A Jewish Women’s Anthology (157-158) last century, it still is as powerful today.

The poems and stories in Reflections in a Rearview Mirror talk about illness, motherhood, and widowhood—all within the framework of what it means to be an out lesbian—in the late 1900s and now, in the early 2000s. They are frank, powerful, and moving reminders—a kind of historical document but also a road map of what it still means to be a lesbian, a mother, an ex-lover, a widow, and a wife, even now, in this perilous and treacherous time.

Judith Katz is the author of two novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, which won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She is currently working on sequels to both novels and is still meditating on her novel in a drawer, The Atomic Age.

Swagger: A Celebration of the Butch Experience
Curated by Rae Theodore and edited by Nat Burns
Flashpoint Publications, 2024, 174 pages
$16.95

“And think about / How much I love / Butches / And the people / Who love them”

(“Butch 4 Butch,” Beck Guerra Carter, 72).

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Swagger is a celebration and an exploration of the identity, history, and community of butch lesbians. Whether you identify as butch or simply want to understand butchness in its multifaceted glory, this work offers great insight and connection. The work begins with artwork such as “Gender” by Ash, and unfolds into retellings and stories from elder butches and poetry that captures the spirit of butch existence. One of the earlier sections written by Merril Mushroom—a name familiar to many Sinister Wisdom readers—announces the book’s intention to define, complicate, and joyfully celebrate butchness, beginning with a non-rigid definition of ‘butch.’ Her words set the tone for the rest of the compilation of voices adding to the conversation on being butch, and reminding readers that defining butchness can be both simple and complex.

The book continually grapples with key questions: What does it mean to be butch? How do we see, define, or know it within ourselves? The explorations in Swagger are as varied as the individuals writing them, but every work has some exploration of these questions, and many presented answers! Georgie Orion lets us know that butches can be anyone—“Lesbians from Girl Scouts. Lesbians from camp. Lesbians from church. Lesbians from school. Basically every grown-up lesbian I had ever met. And they all showed up” (21). Understandings of the intersection between community and the celebration of a shared, comfortable, normalized identity were present all through the work. In addition to descriptions of building a shared community, the topic of self-creation features in several pieces.

The question of masculinity and the boundaries of emulation versus reclamation, which I have always considered a distinctly butch expression, is a recurrent theme. Virginia Black writes,

“While I have emulated men and masculine presentation, I have never wanted to be one, nor felt the need to defend my space as a lesbian against a man…unless he was trying to manspread on public transportation, so I did it first to prove a point. How straight men perceive me doesn’t shape my self-definition” (26).

Cindy Rizzo’s “City Butch” grapples with the insecurities that accompany socially constructed butch stereotypes and reaffirms the confidence to define oneself. She writes, “How far could I stray from a stereotype so I could be true to myself?. . . I knew in spite of everything that I was a butch” (28). The answer to the questions of identity definition and constructed lines aren’t explicit, but several pieces set out that identity can be self-determined and fluid. Virginia Black closes their work by noting the possibility inherent to her self-determination of butchness. How should she define herself and her butchness? They write, “Exhale. / However I want” (27).

Swagger honors the vibrant past of butchness while embracing the ever-evolving diversity of butch identity (and ever-evolving understanding of butch identity). Several authors in the collection touch on trans identity and butchness, which is important in a collection like Swagger. As Audre Lorde writes, “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives” (Sister Outsider, 138). Transphobic rhetoric persists, even in queer communities, erasing the contributions of the people at the forefront of the fight for liberation. Transness is celebrated in this work, too. Swagger sets up a conversation to challenge misconceptions that masculine presentation determines gender or that gender identity and gender performance are inherently the same. The collection also makes it clear that socially drawn lines can become tools of resistance and experimentation.

Finally, I loved reading the authors’ biographies at the end of the work, not only because it gave me insight into the identities of the people creating but also because it provided information on connecting. If you couldn’t tell from my earlier havering on community and connection, I consider it a vital aspect of the queer community, so it was lovely to find these incredible people compiled at the end of the work. Swagger embodies queer community and connection in a really beautiful way. Every butch joyfully existing is evidence of a queer future, so I’ll leave you with Victoria Anne Darling’s rallying words, “Don’t, don’t, don’t / Tone it down” (33).

Allison Quinlan (they/she) volunteers as a copyeditor for Sinister Wisdom and manages a non-profit in the UK that supports survivors of abuse. They’re exceptionally bad at keeping lavender plants alive. . . one could say they’ve become a lavender menace.