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.

A Map of My Want
Faylita Hicks
Haymarket Books, 2024, 94 pages
$17.00

Reviewed by Dot Persica

During my very first very long lesbian relationship, I gifted my then-girlfriend a copy of The Essential June Jordan. In it, I wrote something along the lines of “this book is mine which means it’s yours which means it’s ours.” This year, I got it back neatly packed in a big cardboard ramen box with (some of) my clothes, my old DS, and some other books. Which means it is now mine alone. As is my copy of A Map of My Want, by Faylita Hicks.

“I blinked and we were in love—
then out of love—

then child-shaped again—then not.
Then both of us alone. Together.
The both of us crying into the empty
of our kitchen sinks.

Jesus—how did we
get here, again?”

(Hicks, “BONFIRE BRIDES,” 29).

June Jordan’s work first taught me that poetry could be something else entirely, beyond rhymes and form, that the idea that one might have to sacrifice content for form is entirely false. June Jordan taught me to see poetry as a weapon.

Reading Faylita Hicks, I held June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Emily Dickinson close, as tools to better comprehend what I was interacting with. Lorde and Dickinson are quoted in the book, along with a variety of other writers—Jordan and Giovanni are voices I heard echoing through some of the pages even without them being named. It is their irreverence that I found again in Hicks’ work.

Readers are immediately pulled into Hicks’ world: there is no time for pleasantries, the urgency of Hicks’ voice and the vivid descriptions of images, smells, textures, and specific scenarios create an inescapable sensory trip from the very start. The book is divided in four sections: ALCHEMY, LIFE, LIBERTY, and THE PURSUIT. The omnipresence of the erotic is palpable throughout the book, with the erotic being a natural phenomenon:

“Staring out into this abyss of bush I counted

millions of solar flares, each of them fingering
the ultraviolet of evening, a tinted mimosa

pressing its silk mouth to my swollen knees”

(Hicks, “CHIRON’S BEACH,” 9).

Hicks writes unabashedly about sex and gender, explicit without shame, “What if I was heavy between the legs? What would it feel like to hang my body from a machine—to feel the trickle of time between my skin and shift?” (Hicks, “STEEL HORSES,” 5).

“Who I am now—a kind of boi traveling south//southwest: as far as the stars will
take me

into the land coughing up all of my names, the skin of the road warm (...)”

(Hicks, “ON BECOMING A BRIDGE FOR THE BINARY,” 6).

Parallels are drawn between nature and the body, where one is a metaphor for the other, because they are ultimately the same; borders, frontiers, jails: attempts to contain a body that is meant to be free. Similarly, life and death are also companions who give and take from each other.

Natural disasters are very present in this collection, since Hicks is from California and central Texas, and frequently draws from their experience. Storms and fires are both metaphor and reality, both political and personal—one of the biggest manifestations of the damage done by capitalism, and especially interesting because they don’t discriminate. While the most exploited countries and populations are the ones paying the price of Western climate terrorism, eventually these disasters will catch up with their perpetrators and not even the richest among us will be spared.

Protest in all forms is also an all-encompassing theme, and on these pages the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Sandra Bland appear, sparking deeper analyses about America’s constant attempts to disappear Black life, be it by murder, imprisonment, or both. Hicks writes about their life during and after their captivity in the Hays County Jail, and the mental toll of imprisonment.

“For weeks, I forget what the sun felt like.
I forget I was once loved. I forget affection”

(Hicks, “RELEASE||RELEASE,” 58).

One truly cannot imagine what it means to be imprisoned in America if one has not lived it, and Hicks’ courageous voice forces readers to look right when they would rather close their eyes. It is necessary to see these evils if we are to eradicate them.

Hicks’ work is furiously loving, filled to the brim with hope for their communities, their comrades, their friends, their loved ones, love of their latinidad, love for revolution.

“my city is a river
of college students destined to be
swallowed by the rural expanse
of the Guadalupe.

En protesta, we comrades float
outside of the federal building,
—the county jail where I was buried—
En la lucha! against
the waves of the recently shipped,
the waves of the soon to be drowned,
and the waves of white faces swimming
happily in and out of the front doors”

(Hicks, “DO NOT CALL US BY OUR DEAD NAMES: A DOCUPOEM,” 60).

Hicks unites nature, sex, protest, race, gender, justice, and remembrance in this collection, which will speak to anyone who feels strongly about freedom in its many definitions.

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

Iridescent Pigeons
Candace Walsh
Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2024, 82 pages
$17.99

Reviewed by Pelaya Arapakis

Iridescent Pigeons is a fitting title for Candace Walsh’s enchanting debut—a body of work that ponders the many contours of love, that rejoices in the splendour of the everyday and the profound beauty of the overlooked and discounted. In this chapbook, Walsh traverses seamlessly across time and poetic forms, tracing themes of queer love, desire, nature, loss, motherhood, childhood, and the engravings of trauma. Each poem teems with life, beckoning readers to take a second glance, to embrace stillness, drawing us into a heightened state of awareness of ourselves and the environment around us.

Images of nature abound in Iridescent Pigeons as Walsh revels in both the fecundity and the awe-inspiring intricacies of ecological design. In “Then Suddenly I Know” Walsh exults the healing properties bestowed by nature: “Sometimes I can’t get back to sleep, / while lemon balm breathes / let me soothe you beyond the window screen / and frogsong trembles webs seedpearled with dew” (40). Walsh’s poems unveil worlds within worlds that only begin to unfurl to those who remain attentive and curious, to those “who do not shirk from hills and swerves and barks” (17). However, nature is not just a physical phenomenon in these poems, but a site of memory imbued with deep evocative power.

Walsh pays homage to the many queer women poets who came before her, thus situating her work as part of a long lineage of lesbian and queer love poetry and writing. Virginia Woolf is celebrated in Walsh’s cento “Wild and Frail and Beautiful,” composed of lines from Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room. Woolf is again invoked in the poem “I Want To See You in the Lamplight, in Your Emeralds,” (21) the very title of which is a sentence from a love letter written by Woolf to Vita Sackville-West in 1927. The influence of Sappho is also apparent in Walsh’s use of the sapphic stanza. Midway through the collection, “Sapphic stanza 1,” “Sapphic stanza 2,” and “Sapphic stanza 3” connect readers directly to this vibrant queer legacy of desire-driven poetry. Indeed, much of Sappho’s oeuvre today only exists in fragments, and Walsh’s completed compositions can be read not only as a commemoration of the poet, but as a process of historical restoration. However, Sappho’s impact extends beyond poetic form to Walsh’s use of the natural world as a metaphor for queer love and sensuality. In the poem “Not Fell but Fall” Walsh muses, “How do oceans feel / about these languid vagabonds? / Against her skin I knew, I think, / how seaweed feels. / The sea must feel a thing like love” (5).

Iridescent Pigeons speaks to how queer women have historically articulated desire for one another in coded ways, negotiating through a labyrinth of social hostility and marginalisation. Walsh’s poem “Lesbians and Their Dogs” poignantly reflects on this reality: “I think of dogs with docked tails, / their bumpy rumps wagging nothing. / It reminds me of queer love, / how they used to try to / cut off or drug-numb what offended, / how we sniffed out the invisible / and guess-read the signals” (59). These lines honour the lesbians and queer women throughout history who have loved quietly, transgressively, and ferociously in spite of structures that sought/seek to deny our longings and desires. We continue to love because “We know how much it costs / to cut it off” (59).

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

Old Stranger: Poems
Joan Larkin
Alice James Books, 2024, 100 pages
$24.95

Reviewed by Laura Gibbs

Joan Larkin’s Old Stranger records what it means to sit with the discomforting thought of one’s mortality without flinching. As Larkin’s sixth poetry collection, it is the latest addition to a long line of celebrated work that is unceasingly direct, expansive, and unguarded.

The first of the poem’s compact sections, fittingly titled “Girls Department,” deals with the beauty, the awkwardness, and the violence of youth. My personal favourite from this opening sequence is the poem, “Hexagon-Tiled Bathroom Floor”—a transformation of her quotidian childhood experience of staring at tiles into a musing upon the difficulty her adult self will face in achieving intimacy; like the grout between the hexagons, she will stand “aloof from love” (5). There is a certain breathlessness that pervades many of these early poems due to Larkin’s regular deployment of lengthy stanzas and minimal punctuation, as can be seen in “The Body inside My Body,” “Chain of Events,” and “All at Once.” Youth, in these poems, means ceaseless and often destructive movement.

As the reader progresses through the collection into the middle sections, titled “Old Stranger” and “Whisper Not,” a lingering and mournful voice begins to be heard. The once heady and overwhelming atmosphere of youth is bitterly altered as Larkin reflects upon what it means to live in the face of the deaths of others, including her father, in poems like “The Green Box” and “Gilmore Road.” “Show Jumper” is particularly arresting in its melancholy as Larkin’s speaker levels directly with an unknown figure who has fallen from sporting stardom into the throes of suicidal ideation.

“Crouching Woman,” the final section of Larkin’s collection, is a fitting conclusion to the considerations that pervade her collection—from the unspoken alienation of childhood to the inevitable frailty in old age, including a microscopic focus on quotidian details as well as abstract meditations upon the blurred boundary between creation and destruction. Larkin incorporates a meta-artistic perspective into the majority of these poems, such as “Crouching Woman,” dedicated to the French figurative sculptor Camille Claudel, and the visually arresting “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Six Paintings,” in which Larkin’s stark use of white space resembles the inability to avoid the inquisitive glare of the pregnant subject found in the eponymous painter’s Portrait of Myself on my Sixth Wedding Anniversary. Larkin’s contemplation of other artists leads to the crescendo of her final poem, “Ampersand,” where she considers the intersection of her life and poetic craft as “A pregnant roundness” and “a needle threading itself, / a snake encircling Mercury’s staff” (71).

Larkin’s collection could be seen as something of an “Old Stranger” to its readers, in its strange blending of the known and the intimate with what is alienating and, therefore, largely repressed. Old Stranger is a refusal to give in to the binary thinking that would have these juxtaposing modes of human life strictly separated. It is for this reason that I would recommend Larkin’s collection to anyone willing to sit within the unblinking gaze of her most rattling reflections.

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.

Desire Museum
Danielle Cadena Deulen
BOA Editions, 2023, 104 pages
$17.00

Reviewed by Ruby Stefanucci

Danielle Cadena Deulen’s Desire Museum is a poetry collection navigating the thread of desire across time, relationships, and the female-embodied self. The collection explores and excavates the intricacies of friendship, lesbian love, relationships, and environmental and sociopolitical crises. The poems navigate selfish desire, unselfish desire, desire of the body, of love, of affection, of the world, and of justice, imbued at each angle with an unfinished or unsatisfied longing.

Beginning with symbolism that remains throughout the collection, Deulen paves way for desire as melancholy, as unfulfilled longing, discontent bleeding into regret for what once was and can no longer be. The early pages of the collection set the scene for the speaker’s transparency, often circling back, reasserting, or reassessing, “Searching / for the drawer, I mean the door, I mean my skin” (18) as in the poem “GASLIGHT.”

Deulen expresses desire infused with a lifetime of layers beneath it. The collection endures like a thread of life, of places, people, time, and spaces, mapped across the pages as a gallery of life and human existence alongside desire. In “SELF-DOUBT WITH A CRUCIFIX,” the speaker states, “she sits on her bed, necklace with a crucifix lying / between her breasts […] But I / still feel the slap of the first girl I kissed […]” (36).

Deulen exposes feelings of desire in the body related to regret in unfulfilled longing and hunger for a translation of desire. She yearns for meaning in mythology, and at times is direct with her longing – “either you didn’t love me or you didn’t love me enough” (18) in the poem “WHY I LEFT, WHY I RETURNED” and “you lean in closer for / a secret, but I scream it” (46) in “I CONSIDER YOU SILENCE.” Other times, the longing is elusive– “Only the wind / knows you. Knows you are in the middle / of waiting a long time for something, for someone / to return” (75). Ultimately, Deulen creates a space for the reader to be inspired by and understand their own desire through these texts.

Her most poignant poem is in the final section of the poetry collection, expressed in the long-form poem titled “MUSEUM.” Divided into six numbered sections, the piece reflects Deulen’s attempts to draft the piece dedicated to her friend, Erin James Staffel, who died of suicide. Direct with her language and transparent with her convoluted feelings, the speaker ruminates on memories of love and comfort, reckoning with grief in its layered complexities of sadness, anger, and desire. She follows this piece with a concluding poem, which reaches out to readers, reminding us, “I see you. Know that / echo in your chest means that you want to live” (96). She is reminding us of the spark of desire that lives within us all and keeps us alive.

Ruby Stefanucci (she/her) is a Sinister Wisdom intern based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, Australia. She has recently completed her undergraduate study double majoring in English and History. Ruby is a lover, writer, artist, and poet, but mainly just a girl in the world.

Nest of Matches
Amie Whittemore
Autumn House Press, 2024, 80 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Kelsey McGarry

In Nest of Matches, Whittemore skillfully blends longing, queerness, eroticism, love, loss, and grief with the natural world. This beautiful poetry collection is an exploration and meditation on cycles; the life cycles of humans and animals, the moon cycle, astrological and zodiac cycles, the life and blooming of flowers, relationships, queer identity, and more.

The book is embedded with the contradictions of being alive, especially the dichotomies that can feel innate to queer identity. A series of poems titled “Another Queer Love Poem that Fails” mourns works of art and expression that fall short. In several poems, Whittemore celebrates the possibilities of transfiguration within queerness and recognizes the connections and resilience that queerness often brings.

In “Blue Moon,” Whittemore incorporates phrases from the namesake song by The Marcels, finding renewed meaning in the song’s lyrics while providing another tender addition to the series of poems on the moon cycle. In “Butterfly Bandage,” she remembers her caretaker grandparents and finds comfort in the tending that caretakers can provide long after they are gone, through their memories and the relics they leave behind. In “Libra Questionnaire,” she answers hard-hitting questions about patterns of those born under a Libra sky, using Google’s suggested searches. She answers these astrological questions with authority, consistently giving sincere thought and reverence to every subject.

Each poem is personal and relevant to the aim of loving oneself and the world; Whittemore explicitly reflects on the struggle of self-love for queer people. She describes the beauty in all of earth’s creatures, finding hope in each and every living thing–from her ancestors, to foxes, to the moon.

From walks in poppy fields to observing the full bloom of a peony, the collection reads like a sweet walk through both earthly and astral meadows. She creates a natural world so appealing that it feels like a dreamworld, while expertly reminding us that the most beautiful visions of all are found in our everyday surroundings, like the flowers we see, the moon that guides our evenings, the waves, and the presence of our ancestors in the natural world.

This collection of poems feels like an aching love letter to desire in the queer body. There is at once a wisdom and a deep vulnerability in each poem, which does not seem accidental; this mixture is an intentional, calculated balance. The collection inspires the reader to appreciate the holiness in both stillness and the natural elements that move all too quickly.

Kelsey McGarry is a Sinister Wisdom intern and volunteer based in Los Angeles, CA. She is interested in queer history and archiving, scheming, and being outside.