First Love: Essays on Friendship
Lilly Dancyger
The Dial Press, 2024, 224 pages
$30.00

Reviewed by Leslie Lopez

“To nurture and care for another person, to provide them with tenderness and emotional shelter from the world that mostly doesn’t give a shit about them. To love so fiercely and with such unrestraint that the recipient of that love feels sustained by it, and never feels fully alone in the world. This is what my closest friends give to me, and what I try to give to them” (138).

Lilly Dancyger’s First Love: Essays on Friendship is an honoring of female friendship and the ways these relationships become early sites of platonic intimacy.

Dancyger opens this collection by sharing that her cousin, Sabina, was her first love. From being children who created new words to describe their love for each other to spending time together at different points in their adolescence, each anecdote shows the connection between them remaining strong despite the physical distance and circumstances of life. It’s not a surprise that Dancyger comes to see friendship as synonymous with vulnerability, deep love, and belonging.

But First Love is also about grief. When Sabina is brutally murdered a few weeks shy of her twenty-first birthday, it’s the powerful friendships Dancyger has cultivated that keep her treading above water. These relationships are the basis for the fifteen essays, each one providing an additional cultural layer or personal memory that moves the collection along.

In “The Fire Escape,” Dancyger recounts living with her friend in a crammed East Village apartment. She goes on to describe how the rusted metal perch outside their kitchen window became a space for the friends to connect over cigarettes and alcohol, even after Sabina’s death. She goes on to say of her friends, “Not one of them tried to persuade me to come inside, and for that I loved them more than ever” (108). Thus, the fire escape provided Dancyger the freedom to grieve, exist, and be cared for in a time of tremendous pain.

Dancyger’s writing about friendship also includes a discussion of her fractured relationship with her mother and her indecision about becoming a parent. In “Mutual Mothering,” she shares, “What I do know is that when I imagine what kind of mother I would be, it’s the kind of friend I’ve been that allows me to see it clearly, and to believe I’d do it well” (161). It’s this honesty and unabashed importance of platonic relationships that feels refreshing, especially in a culture that puts romantic relationships on a pedestal and sells the narrative that traditional family is the only real source of care.

Reading First Love served as a reminder that grief can also be an exploration of what it means to have loved, been loved, and continue loving in a world as simultaneously scary and joyous as ours.

Leslie Lopez (she/they) is a Dallas-born, Chicago-based writer pursuing a Master’s of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She can often be found crocheting (badly), laughing (loudly), and reviewing books on her Instagram, @anotherlesbrarian.

Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows
Megan Milks
Feminist Press, 2026, 336 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by [sarah] Cavar

Milk: It’s everywhere, in everything (12). So says Megan Milks in Mega Milk, a wide-ranging reflection on race, gender, size, species, and milk, a secretion that looms large in the U.S. corporate-cultural zeitgeist. Milk has undergone something of a transition in the decades since Milks’s childhood, shifting shape from a hallmark of the healthy, all-American, and notably white diet, into something of a commercial downward spiral, blame for which has been attributed to anything from Gen Z, to veganism, to allergies. With this fluidity in mind, Milks is invested in the “trans potentiality of milk” (28), the capacity of the fluid to shift shape and meaning not only in rhetoric, but in the bodyminds of those who produce, exchange, and consume it.

In approaching milk’s trans potentiality, Milks begins with what might be understood as the cis potential of milk, detailing the lives of cows subjected to abusive breeding and milking regimes, either as incubators or as inseminators. For Milks, the lived experience of cows is entangled both with life-giving (sustenance for their late cat, Claude) and life-taking (the premature killing of those cows that have outlived their “production value” [86] as well as the suffering of migrant workers, including children, forced to work on these farms). Likewise, they acknowledge that, as a formula-fed baby, cows have been something of a “foster mother” (132) to them—coming into uncomfortable proximity with the racialized and classed position of prior centuries’ wet nurses.

The trans potentiality of milk also emerges in its crossings from word, to name, to material necessity. “Milk,” as a word, summons “cow,” a term appended to fat, feminized people, Milks’s child-self included. Milk, and its absence, becomes symbolic of Milks’s disordered eating. Additionally, the material attachment of milk to the breast—and, by extension, to femininity, motherhood, and the concept of femaleness itself—is rich territory for trans exploration: in “The Letdown: Lactation Suite,” Milks historicizes their relationship to a body coercively assigned female at birth; the complexities of binding, intimacy, and self-knowledge; and to the expectations and demands placed upon nursing parents.

Much like the contradictory expectations placed upon trans people—both to transition “fully” for legitimacy’s sake, and not to transition at all—nursing parents (understood as “mothers”) face dual pressure to embrace the “naturalness” of the breast and to embrace the science of formula so as to preserve their looks and properly nourish their children. This places people of marginalized genders, whether nursing or not, into what Milks correctly puns a “double-bind”: there is no way to fully satisfy a cisheteropatriarchal system in its insatiable hunger for subjugation across species, gender, and positionality.

Race, too, is implicated in the commercial and symbolic impacts of milk, particularly for the U.S. In the essay “MAGA Milk,” Milks quotes a speech by then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in 1923: “Upon this industry, more than any other of the food industries, depends not alone the problem of public health, but there depend upon it the very growth and virility of the white race” (172). Indeed, the racialization of milk—not to mention its embeddedness in systems of white, christian supremacy—extend further back than U.S. empire: in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, breastmilk was understood as excess menstrual blood, saved and transmuted in order to feed newborn babies. “Bad milk,” including milk contaminated by unsanitary dairy practices, was an affront not only to a baby’s health but to its selfhood, a kind of ontological contamination informed by racist, classist ideologies. Later, after a cultural flip spurred on by the American eugenics movement, healthy, “pure” milk became a hallmark of the fit family—once again, milk consumption (albeit of a different kind) was a prerequisite for purity, goodness, and normality.

It is no surprise, then, that Milks’s best moments in this collection are moments of profound impurity—moments where their thoughts cross from human to nonhuman, diluting the myths of fitness and purity the image of milk now offers. Milks, in escaping themself, escapes the inevitable inadequacies of anthropocentric interpretation when attempting to approach nonhuman ways of knowing. In the startling essay “Milking the Bull,” Milks decides to inseminate themself with the sperm of a bull, and in so doing, internalizes and ultimately reproduces his story in a queer, literary (re)birth. The latter pages of the essay are devoted not to Milks’s experiences, but the bull’s, and the reader follows the narrative to his life’s inevitable end. This essay—perhaps the most uncomfortable in the entire collection—is a highlight, both for its taboo subject matter and for the empathy and intentionality of its portrayal. In this moment, more than any other, Milks sits in the crevice between their body and another’s, and asks what it means to cross that boundary, to trans it, together.

As a constellation of essays on milk’s many meanings and potentialities, Mega Milk is deeply, powerfully uncomfortable. At times, I felt impatient with the text, eager to move from moments of observation and reflection to critical analysis, particularly regarding the nonhuman animals on whose bodily fluids the book relies. Particularly in moments where milk is present but its nonhuman producers, notably, are absent (such as in “Tres Leches”), it feels as though cows are a specter haunting a story that tries to be about something else—about gender, about economics, about family, about identity. While touching on the ethical and environmental urgency of critique, Mega Milk is persistently reflective in a way I did not expect, and struggle to collect my feelings about.

At the same time, Milks anticipates my critique, meets it before it escapes my mouth, or my hands, onto the page. “No, it’s personal essays,” they explain to a Hindu physical therapist, who asks if the collection is “making a case against dairy” (265). In a roundabout way, Milks has, throughout the course of the text, called out some of my own bona fides: whiteness and rurality of upbringing, transness and chosen distance from the “femaleness” yoked to us from birth, experiences of restrictive, disorderly eating. Then there is veganism, part of my life for twelve of my twenty-seven years, and the attendant expectations that this collection do the polemic work that it neither claims nor seeks to do. This is a trans book, a queer book, a book about openings and potentialities. There exist dozens of polemics describing accurately and in detail the evils of industrial animal agriculture, not to mention the white supremacist nationalisms embedded in American food production and distribution. So I let the text rest, took time to think. Let my thoughts gestate, squeeze out what remains. And at that ending is how I begin this review.

[sarah] Cavar is the author of Failure to Comply (featherproof books, 2024) and Differential Diagnosis (Northwestern University Press, 2026). They hold a PhD in Cultural Studies and Science & Technology Studies from the University of California, Davis, and can be found online at www.cavar.club, @cavar on bluesky, and at librarycard.beehiiv.com.

Fragments of Wasted Devotion
Mia Arias Tsang, illustrated by Levi Wells
Quilted Press, 2025, 144 pages
$16.00

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Fragments of Wasted Devotion is an incredibly self-descriptive title. Before reading, I assumed it was the poetic, hooking title that so many collections use (and then vaguely connect to one piece in the work), but no, this is simply a collection of Tsang’s fragments of wasted devotions. She sets the reader up to know the story won’t end well: “My heart was too young to be settled,” and she proceeds to become devoted anyway: “but I laid it down on your chest anyway” (1). From the first line, she presents the reader with the question: What does one do with unrequited devotion?

The ‘fragments’ aspect of the title rings true as well. Each work tosses you into a story with little to no context, and you certainly won’t find out the conclusion here, either. Readers see a fragmented narrative where the only throughline you can grasp is the devotion, again and again, no matter the person, place, or time. I struggled with this a bit, but I think that’s because I personally wrestle with more poetic vignettes like this work, not due to any flaw in the book. However, given that the fragments of Tsang’s wasted devotions are the heart of this collection, I found this fragmented presentation of vignettes clever and intriguing.

I deeply appreciated the honesty in her writing. Who hasn’t wondered how to hold someone in their heart if they can’t “eat my groceries before they rot?” (8). You don’t have to have your whole life together to love someone deeply. Tsang also dips into the complicated truth of loving someone who has hurt you (I’m also a firm believer in holding love and anger in your heart at the same time). “Melatonin Dreams” is a three-part piece where Tsang describes the pain of recurring dreams about her partner; a house in New Haven that’s long, brown, and green “like a shotgun. . . I’m ready for you to blow my head off again” (34) and then writes, “I am still trying to protect you from the rage of everyone who wants me to be happy” (35). Don’t we all know it—you have long conversations with family and friends, tearing apart someone for how they treated you, but you have that inexplicable urge to defend them (not their actions necessarily, just them). It can feel hard to hate someone you’ve seen humanity in, no matter how they left you. She finishes, “It’s hell to be trapped behind my own eyes, letting you happen to me when I’m supposed to have control here” (38).

How much these experiences are actually in Tsang’s control, I’m not sure. She writes, “I am on edge and I am breaking my life to get to you because that is what I do for what I love” (42), and she buys the bus ticket, crossing cities to reach someone one hundred and forty-three point three miles away. And again, she writes that the people she loves ask, in horror, “Why do you keep doing this to yourself?” (44). But Tsang answers her own questions, and mine, and those of the people who love her, when she writes, “I touch the feral creature of my heart and ask is there anything left to give and it howls yes yes yes forever” (42). “Longing Distance” was my favourite section of the collection because it replicates a feeling I think many of us have experienced, to some degree, of putting the world on hold to get to someone we love who doesn’t necessarily return the effort. “I shouldn’t have had to beg,” she writes, “I wish I could want anything else” (67–68).

So what does one do with unrequited devotion? The reader is welcome to find their own answer. Tsang, for her part, “fade[s] to black with a heart bursting with all the love you wouldn’t take and I know I’ll forgive you anything” (111).

Lastly, on page 15, there is an illustration of a little creature with a face like this: (•⤙•), and I love it. I didn’t write about all the illustrations, but every one was absolutely gorgeous, full of whimsy, and engaging.

Allison Quinlan is a PhD student in Scotland and might be the world’s slowest writer.

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.

Loving Corrections
adrienne maree brown
AK Press, 2024, 200 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

Loving Corrections is adrienne maree brown’s most relational book yet, exploring how communities can get “specific, and deeper, when we have accumulated the wisdom to challenge harmful norms of privilege and power” (4). brown wants us all to retain a curious posture in the face of diverse people and problems. Readers are invited to confront uncomfortable truths about their own biases—and how to confront others’—in the name of a love for our collective future.

brown did not write Loving Corrections to police activists, reprimanding them for not believing the right things or living out their solidarity in a specific way—in fact, brown’s essays rarely contain explicit political positions that may divide her audience. Instead, there is an entire chapter titled, “Righting Solidarity: Flocking Together.” She wisely shares that “confusion is a colonial tactic,” meaning that a lack of community between oppressed groups creates dissociation from intersectional issues that could be reconciled with a robust solidarity (85). Relationships come first in activism, brown believes, and it is the work of the activist to flock “with the people,” not to be in a position of power that confuses or fractures groups (92, italics brown’s).

In the chapter “Love Looks Like Accountability,” brown dives deep into how our personal relationships can have a ripple effect on how our society functions. In a digital world where “therapy speak” is often used incorrectly or in harmful ways, this chapter is a wonderful refresher on how we can love ourselves and others through the right ways of engaging in relationships. brown quotes Prentis Hemphill: “boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously” (153). brown writes about how we must be responsible for our internal state and how it might impact others, how we must apologize and receive apologies, and how to know when it is best to let a relationship go. These feel like simple emotional teachings we learn in elementary school, but later in life, our capitalist system does not reward this loving behavior. Starting small with improving love in everyday relationships will create a more accountable and loving society.

In the conclusion to Loving Corrections, brown reveals that this is the last time she will write specifically for those “active in movements for social and environmental change” (189). This does not mean her work, nor ours, is close to finished. Loving Corrections is the sixth book that brown has written in the Emergent Strategy Series—which contains thirteen books in total—and oh boy, what a comprehensive and necessary series it is. These books are gentle yet mighty tools for activists and their communities. Loving Corrections affirms that, always, “there is love at the center” (7).

Courtney Heidorn (she/they) is an Assistant Editor for Chestnut Review and 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 in CURIOUS Magazine and Pearl Press. Find them on Instagram and Substack @palimpsestpoems.

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).

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.

The Weird Sister Collection: Writing at the Intersections of Feminism, Literature, and Pop Culture
Edited by Marisa Crawford
Feminist Press, 2024, 264 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Gabe Tejada

With the resurgence of books, largely due to readers on social media, an integral part of the literary ecosystem seems to have been neglected: the literary magazine. The Weird Sister Collection—a book edited by Marisa Crawford—is a timely homage to that particular species of the literary and art magazine: the blog.

The collection begins with a foreword by Michelle Tea, dyke queen of the countercultural 1990s lesbian literary scene. Tea writes, “Something that had felt so private and obscure to me had also been found and claimed by others” (xii), a feeling I’m sure was shared by each one of us upon discovering Sinister Wisdom, whether in its inception back in 1976 or doom-stumbling onto its Instagram account in 2024. Here, as in the Weird Sister book and blog, we write about “(our) feminist history, (our) places in the past, and the feminism we’re all making right now” (xii). Lovers of literary magazines will feel at home in the eclectic—yet cohesive—mix of art critique, politically engaged personal (or personally engaged political) narratives, and cultural commentary found in this collection. Though divided into seven thematic categories, including “Talking Back to the Canon,” “Double, Double Pop Culture Trouble,” and “Performance, Identity, and Public Space,” each piece fuses high and low art as well as popular and obscure cultural references to capture the feminist millennial milieu of its writers.

Sam Cohen’s “I am Jenny Schecter, Please Love Me” was a vindication, not just for Jenny, but for all the LAGs (lesbians after graduation) like her. How after a certain age, the certainty of one’s queer identity is expected, with those still dis/uncovering their queerness seen to be lagging behind. “We Were There: Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter at the New Museum” by Hossannah Asuncion was an institutional critique through “the care of the (Black woman’s) body” (200). In naming all of the artists involved, through their text Asuncion extends the reclamation of cultural space that is often denied Black women artists—a continuation of the care underpinning the collective’s actions. Similarly, Megan Milks’ piece on Barbara Grier’s pseudonyms also contends with (literary) space. At the same time that they acknowledge Grier’s contributions to lesbian literature, Milks points out how Grier’s plethora of pseudonyms led to her monopolization of lesbian/queer space. On the other hand, Soleil Ho’s piece—also involving a nom de plume—is a searing reminder of the pitfalls of tokenistic diversity and inclusion. The title, “Yi-Fen Chou and the Man Who Wore Her,” shows how easily our marginalizations can be appropriated and weaponized against us, echoing the long history of the white man’s abuse of our bodies.

The Weird Sister Collection is an eclectic concoction of essays and narratives. Inside its pages, feminist and queer readers and activists will find writing that will both comfort and challenge them.

Gabe Tejada is an emerging arts writer and student based in Naarm.

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.