The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art
Eileen Myles
Semiotext(e), 2009, 368 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Pippin Lapish

My Date with Eileen Myles

My girlfriend Sascha and I are in Brooklyn. Our night out begins at a tattoo parlor offering fifty dollar flash designs. I think Sascha wants a cross on the back of her neck, or maybe a smattering of stars on her hip descending into the delta of her crotch, or “mom” written inside a
pierced heart on her shoulder. I’m not sure, but all of her ideas translate tradition into the language of youth.

We walk into the shop and the poseur vibe is suffocating. The music is bad and too loud, the lights are too bright. It’s a bad idea to get tattooed somewhere so transparently and terminally uncool. So we leave. We both operate via reflexive aesthetic judgements.

On our way out, we pass a bookstore. I duck in automatically and wordlessly. It became a game for me to sniff out the good titles, to trim my vision into the pattern of spines. And then I won the game: I found a book I’ve been looking for. The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art by Eileen Myles.

The title is nonsensical. When you’re Eileen Myles, the title of your book doesn’t have to make sense, because you’re a hotshot. The book is a collection of previously unpublished essays, interviews, and blog posts, the dregs of a career. It’s a little hard to find, which is why I hadn’t already read it. Iceland lived in my saved for later list on Amazon, but buying from Amazon always feels desperate and cheap, like winning by default. Finding it in the wild, especially by accident, was triumphant. I had made the Big Catch, the winning kill. The book isn’t one of Myles’ pithy, slimmer volumes either. It looks like a textbook, thick and turquoise, with a photograph of an iceberg on the cover. The title is in all caps, and the Semiotext(e) logo announces the book’s verbose obscurity. It’s not bestseller or cult-classic material: it’s for the serious, rabid fans of Myles, those pitiful fanatics who lap up their every word.

GOD HATES BAGS, at least in New York, so I was stuck carrying the book around all night. It became a third wheel. Sascha had mapped our night out:

1. Get a tattoo
2. Get sushi
3. Ride back to Manhattan for a haunted house
4. Go to sex shop for a new cock

Our first order of business was an unceremonious yet total failure. The bookstore was shoved right between items one and two, imperceptibly inserted by me. It was a pound where I picked up a new pet, so Sascha was rightfully endeared and a little annoyed at my impulsivity. Iceland was a parrot occasionally chiming in. A newfound object of my attention and affections.

At the sushi restaurant, the book occupied its own little corner of the table, except for the moments I picked it up and dragged my finger along the pages. A few times, I committed a grave vulgarity: I cracked the book open and read a few lines at the table. Sascha stared at me as my head lowered and I squinted in the dim light. My attention was caught by a line: “. . .you are breaking the code of the working class by aiming to be a big cheese” (14). “Ha, Sascha, listen to this!” But then I saw her stony expression and. . . nevermind.

Reading Eileen Myles is the experience of discovering language. Like, “Oh what does this button do” and then you find out. Myles handles words with both reverence and a deeply personal sense of play. Puttering around in language but then holding specimens up to the light.

Sometimes I decide that text by Eileen Myles is my property. I just think “Yeah, you’re coming home with me,” and then it doesn’t go away. Eileen Myles’ prose is loyal. They write a lot about dogs and their writing seems to have a canine sort of personality. Meaty, heaving and drooling.

Eileen Myles treats all subject matter with the same weight. Every observation, object, or feeling is described with Myles’ signature certainty, so it all gets blown up onto this cosmic emotional scale. Everything, from the pain of losing their father to the creak of a wooden bed frame, is handled with the same odd mixture of intensity and flippancy. In Iceland, there’s an essay about working class speech. Myles says: “I think the part of working class speech that I’m aiming at today. . . is this willingness to throw the words away, to let the situation speak” (17-18). Myles really gives objects a chance, and a voice. Reading Eileen Myles has the mythic futility of emptying and filling a lake in equal parts. I am talking about Myles’ measuredness, their evenness, or their fairness. It’s all nice and balanced in Myles’ work. Not flat nor mathematical, just outstretched, like a palm or a clearing. Real open. You can step right inside.

After the sushi we were back on the L train, returning to Manhattan for the climax of the night, the haunted house.

When Sascha tells me stories about Los Angeles I have to manually paste the idea of heat on top of the scene. Heat and fame are two elements of Los Angeles that one grows immune to. The Midwest breeds loners, but she always felt like one part of something bigger, a conduit to a world that’s always churning and producing. She’s four foot eleven and beautiful in an untroubled way, which means she fits in everywhere. She’s a letter shook loose from the morning paper, always ready to burst into a headline. She’s kinetic—a live wire, a turning point. Iceland says “. . .it’s so American to think you can figure it out alone. With a little help from your famous friend” (160).

At a certain point in the haunted house, an actress dressed in a white slip with black hair over her eyes started breathing in my ear. In my terror, I shoved Iceland over my face, like a child with his blanket. I started thinking of the book as my exit out of the constructed nightmare, a little self-contained cell of the outside world. It was funny to see Eileen Myles’ name in a sudden red glint, bringing me, momentarily, out of the illusion. Fitting, somehow. Like Iceland is a break room in hell where the demons can go drink coffee out of styrofoam cups before heading back to work. Iceland says it’s like “. . .hand painted Goth, I mean S-C-A-R-Y, everything is ‘kid,’ and for one cool weird moment (well, nine minutes) we are all totally free” (311). That’s the great thing about haunted houses. Sort of like in a book, you’re not responsible for your actions inside a haunted house. You can scream and piss and fall on the floor and no one’s allowed to fault you. Iceland and haunted houses exist in this identical, egalitarian emotional sense, like you can get away with anything so you try everything.

One thing about Eileen Myles is that they never explain anything. There are no extended metaphors in Myles’ work. Everything is up front, bare, and laid out. They’re a real take it or leave it kind of author. Author is derived from the Latin augere, meaning to originate, which is where we get authority. So Myles is well within their etymological right to make no sense. In their book Afterglow they say, “The English language is extremely boaty.” And that totally deranged thought strikes me as incredibly correct. Because Myles doesn’t dither or wring their hands or worry, for an instant, about being understood. Their writing is governed by their intrinsic and inalienable authority, the writer’s birthright. They’re unreliable. Their writing is shaped like the slump of a shrugging shoulder or the contours of a dismissive hand. In Iceland they say, “Camera means room in Italian. No stanza does. Maybe it’s Spanish. Anyhow, I feel like a camera which is not” (320). Overall, Myles doesn’t know what they’re talking about. They just put it out there and middlemen, sifters, and interventionists like me handle the rest. They throw the meaning outside the parameters of the page, like the words are in the book, but the message is elsewhere.

Myles’ writing is a lot like a tin roof. Rippled shelter. Either hot to the touch or cool. Flimsy, but who would fuck with a tin roof? Even nature seems to spare it out of pity. There’s something scrappy and twee about it. Always an A for effort.

Myles flits between personas. Sometimes they’re a refined art critic and sometimes they’re shaking their fist at a cloud. They’re flighty and gimcrack. They mostly punch up. They’re assured and aloof but grubby, somehow both hardworking and bohemian. I picture their books coming together like a barn raising, but a barn raising that happens in a dream, so no one really breaks a sweat.

After the haunted house, we keep moving, still working off the adrenaline. Iceland says “You don’t want to be scared. You want to be excited, ennobled, teased alive.” “Heh, Sascha, listen to”—two eyes, recently recovered from terror and newly adjusted to the dark, shoot toward me—“nevermind.”

We walk to our favorite sex shop. Five inches is no longer cutting it. It’s an easy fix. It’s weird to browse for a prosthesis, but it’s funny to think that I can upgrade an organ. Is it a humiliation or a privilege? It’s just funny. Iceland says, “I see the pussy on the tip of a dick. A fat little smiley face” (304). A dildo’s pronouns would be ha/ha.

I pick out the strap. I walk over to Sascha, who’s flipping through the porno magazines. We pick out two issues from 2007. Later that night, we go through them and rip out the ugly girls.

The new strap is sixty dollars. I try not to imagine fucking her with sixty dollars. Iceland says “It seemed to me to be on the order of a lesbian ripple or chip.” Right: like a crinkly fistful of bills. I think about Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism as it pertains to my cock—oh, sorry. Sascha hates that word. Instead, she calls it a “worthy investment,” which makes me imagine it increasing in value, like my boner is a graph of an improving economy.

With my girlfriend, my newly buzzed hair, my leather jacket, a book by Eileen Myles, two porno magazines, and strap in a black plastic bag, I could feel my gayness literally hanging off of me. Iceland talks about “little girls hawking lesbianism. . . on a 40s street corner like they knew they had something cooler than lemonade” (66). I felt like the biggest dyke in the world, which is to say, a king. There’s not a more kingly feeling than your girlfriend being a little bit mad at you.

Sometimes I have these thoughts or experiences where I think to myself, “That’s an Eileen Myles moment.” Like when Sascha said to me, “They just don’t make tour buses like they used to.” And that statement feels like a joke, but there’s a vaguely sad plea for reflection buried right in there. That’s Eileen Myles’ formula: an acute yet superfluous observation with a twist of painful honesty.

Laying in bed that night, when Iceland’s been put away and the cock proved its worth, I tell Sascha why I like Eileen Myles so much. I told her about this one time, when I was reading Inferno, and they described the clit as a ‘spud.’ That’s the exact moment I realized just what you could do with language. Sascha cringed and said, “Eileen Myles should be tried for their crimes against my imagination.” I replied, “Be careful what you say; it’s gonna end up in the essay.”

Pippin Lapish is a writer from Michigan. Her work has previously appeared in Denver Quarterly, Gryllus Magazine, 11½ Journal, and Narrative Magazine. Her first poetry book, The Contrarian, is forthcoming from Hobby Horse Press. She lives in New York City.

The Land is Holy
noam keim
Radix Media, 2024, 180 pages
$24.95

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

“My blood is trying to tell me something, and in the dark of the house I am trying to listen” (15).

In The Land is Holy, noam keim crafts lyrical essays, each braided with profound metaphors containing miles of connections across generations and geography. Through stories of storks, aoudads, and linden tea, the reader witnesses a mosaic of keim’s ethnic and cultural reality. keim is a Jewish Arab born in Occupied Palestine, who spent their childhood and young adulthood in France, and finally moved to Turtle Island in their adulthood. The Land is Holy is a gift for readers searching for a home in our postcolonial world.

For keim, home sometimes means freedom and exile. Their complicated relationship with home is put into perspective with their striking natural metaphors. Like keim, the aoudad has an interesting history of migration and displacement. They write, “The aoudads have switched homes, trading their ancestral West to the West of the new world” (33). This migration and displacement is keim’s lived experience. All of keim’s geographical homes are tainted by histories of conquest and colonization, so they must find true home amidst grief. They lament, “I am grieving and I want to blame geography for my grief. If I were home, I wouldn’t feel grief anymore” (40, italics theirs). What is home, then? Geography? A feeling? People? To keim, home may be constant migration.

Birds are an important motif in The Land is Holy, but their prime function is to display the natural reality of movement and liberation. keim recounts a rare outdoor prison visit with their friend, where they see a starling fly over. At this time, they were discussing liberation (24). The collection opens with a stork flying home for spring: “They will return. Storks always find their way back home” (12). keim suggests that migration, seasonal travel towards a place that meets your needs, is liberation. Starlings and storks know when and where to fly by instinct. Their act of flying home, and keim’s act of discerning their own home, should be as natural as breathing.

keim leaves the proverbial nest of their childhood to answer the call of liberation. When she is young, keim’s mother changes her name from Hassiba to Hassida. Just one letter changes the meaning of her mother’s name to the Hebrew word for stork, “becoming the only home she would know” (16). Hassida’s chosen name is the driving theme of this collection. However, keim has not spoken to their mother since they left France. Despite this, they write: “I seem to always return to the feeling of being my mother’s child” (17). Their relationship with their mother is a place of deep love yet also hurt, requiring sacrifice and grief. Like the stork, keim always finds their way back home to their mother, albeit metaphorically.

keim discusses how important the concept of flâne is to them; it directly translates to “wander,” “stroll,” or “saunter” aimlessly. But to them, it gains a political meaning: flâne is “the holiness of the unplanned, the cycles of rebirth that come from experiencing new realities” (145). The reader must practice flâne when reading The Land is Holy. This collection of essays is meant to be wandered through. Read only a few essays at a time and savor its holy land.

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.

How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures
Sabrina Imbler
Hachette Book Group, Back Bay Books, 2024, 288 pages
$21.99

Reviewed by Dot Persica

I was in Brooklyn waiting for an audition when I stepped into Greenlight Bookstore to pass the time. How Far the Light Reaches immediately seized my attention. I didn’t know it would be a Queer book when I picked it up; I was just captivated by the cover illustrated by Simon Ban. I can’t help but think it’s no coincidence Queer people keep finding each other in the midst of the world’s attempts to isolate us. Something at my fingertips must have known before I did why, once I picked up this book, I could not part with it.

How Far the Light Reaches has everything. Imbler takes us on a journey of self-discovery by connecting ten sea creatures with peculiar characteristics to events in the author’s life: they dive into their relationship with their mother and disordered eating through the story of the octopus mother who starves in order to protect her eggs; they travel back to their grandmother’s youth guided by the Chinese sturgeon; they look deep into their present and future, exploring what it means to be different and to be part of a whole through creatures like hybrids and salps. Imbler’s experiences with sex, race—specifically being biracial and Asian in America—their gender nonconformity and the constant discovery of who they have been and who they are becoming are explored alongside each creature, connected seamlessly. The isolation of being racialized in a predominantly white context, the overwhelming joy of discovering spaces in which they are no longer the minority, the pain and the solace found in being who they are, navigating the aftermath of sexual assault, finding love and losing it and finding it elsewhere, everywhere—are all experiences that coexist and overlap. They cannot be separated but are dissected in this book like little animals, part of Imbler’s quest for answers.

This is the strange and beautiful, perfectly crafted child of the memoir and the encyclopedia.

As I was reading, I felt as though I was shifting from egg to larva to juvenile to adult, like one of the creatures described by the author: I was part of their delightful, excruciating, rewarding journey of growing up, and I felt as though I was going through all those changes myself in a strange time loop of my own making, pausing whenever I was forced by the outside world to look up from the book, and resuming my metamorphosis as soon as my eyes returned to the page.

Imbler digs to the root of painful topics in a gentle way. Their retelling of their trauma is for those who understand it: it’s an embrace rather than a slap; it doesn’t seek to spark compassion in the disinterested perpetrators. Imbler’s vulnerability is for those who have had similar experiences. In doing so, they hold not only their readers but also their own younger self (all their selves) in an embrace that lasts until the final page of this book, past the acknowledgements, and up to the last citation, maybe longer. This is a love letter to Queer people, an ode to the perpetual survival of marginalized communities against all odds.

I got through this book in two days because I am an autistic lesbian who wants to know the secrets of the ocean but was too bad at science to try to go into marine biology, but it would have been hard to put down regardless. The creatures chosen by Imbler for this personal and poetic work span from ordinary to almost mythical; we learn about the incredible adaptability of the goldfish and the surreal habitat of the yeti crab, living in conditions we consider absurd. Queerness is defying expectation, making it through, the same way nobody teaches ontogeny reversal to the immortal jellyfish, but somehow they know how to do it. Making sense of your existence on your own terms in a world that wants you docile and compliant because you are a “woman,” because you are Asian, is defying expectations. Loving someone who is like you when you are consistently told that the way you are is wrong: defying expectations. With each creature, the concepts of “natural” and “unnatural” are redefined—each creature is a key unlocking a facet of the human experience; each human experience is transposed into something greater, a whole that we are all part of.

How Far the Light Reaches is a window into each other, which means ourselves, through Imbler’s work. What a gift.

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.

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

Reviewed by Darla Tejada

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

My Withered Legs and Other Essays
Sandra Gail Lambert
University of Georgia Press, 2024, 152 pages
$23.95

Reviewed by Kali Herbst Minino and Darla Tejada

My Withered Legs is Sandra Gail Lambert’s new memoir essay collection observing shifting relations between the different facets of her life–including writing, disability, aging, and autonomy.

Throughout, Lambert conceives of and interrogates power through a spectrum of in/dependence. Due to the societal and familial context of her upbringing—pre-Rehabilitation Act America in a military family—Lambert, particularly in her youth, equates power with a masculinist idea of strength.

Even in its mere recounting, the machismo attitude Lambert displays—one that values strength and abhors vulnerability—is off-putting, a testament to her evocative writing and presence on the page. Yet the moments when she feels most powerful because she exerts an inordinate amount of physical, mental, and emotional strength become especially poignant when contextualised within the dominant capitalist culture.

A careful reader will recognise that Lambert’s attitude in insisting to navigate, without help, a society that does not consider—and therefore was not built—for her needs is a symptom of living in a culture where (perceived) ability is currency. In a hyper-individualist America where humanity is reduced to a tokenistic autonomy, isolating independence is valued above community.

Lambert’s narrative triumphs in subtly challenging her own entrenched ideas of power. Illustrated by the shifting dynamics of her relationship with her mother and with her partner Pam, readers experience Lambert’s hard-won self-acceptance of being cared for. Her depiction of care work is nuanced, riddled with guilt and triumph, fear and freedom, and caring for is irrevocably intertwined with taking care of. Throughout this process we see how Lambert comes to understand that, just as “Disability was different from illness,” so too is vulnerability different from weakness.

Despite the specificity of Lambert’s perspective and experience, her writing is bound to resonate with readers of all kinds. Artfully covering topics of independence, the writing process, aging, and familial and romantic relationships, the collection of essays is about much more than the title suggests—her legs.

It is surprising that the collection is titled My Withered Legs. In the essay of the same name (though with the addition of “what is lost” in parenthesis), Lambert details a public obsession with her legs, with editors demanding to hear more details about them. Following this advice would erase the original point of her writing.

Choosing My Withered Legs as the collection’s title serves a dual purpose. It satiates the editor’s and the public’s obsession with her legs, which then drives the point of the titular essay home. I imagine an able-bodied reader—picking up the book because they are infatuated with the idea of reading about Lambert’s legs and struggles with disability—having a rude awakening when they realize they’ve played into the exact issue the author is critiquing.

The challenges Lambert faces in publishing her writing leave questions about what didn’t make it through the editorial filter, i.e. “My Withered Legs (what is lost),” and whether or not her wide appeal is something to be celebrated. In “Crip Humor,” Lambert explains that people using wheelchairs and their community would find the story funny. Explaining the joke makes the essay understandable to a large audience, but it became Lambert’s role to make that kind of understanding possible. If Lambert hadn’t had to cater to an able-bodied audience, how would the essay differ?

Readers can only speculate the answer to that question, and can only imagine exactly what was lost. In the meantime, Lambert’s collection is a perfect read for anyone pondering power—inside or outside the pages.

Kali Herbst Minino is a freelance journalist based in Seattle who works primarily for Seattle Gay News. They use a restaurant job to help fund their freelance journalism habit and love reading about labor movements, feminism, and media studies.

Darla Tejada is a writer and reader based in Naarm/Melbourne whose work has been published in Archer Magazine and Kill Your Darlings, among others. Her greatest achievement thus far is her 800-day Duolingo streak.