Wound
Oksana Vasyakina, translated by Elina Alter
Catapult, 2024, 240 pages
$16.95

Reviewed by Bailey Hosfelt

The plot of Wound is straightforward: a lesbian poet retrieves her mother’s ashes in the industrial steppe city of Volzhsky, returns to a life adrift in Moscow, and travels back to the small Siberian town of Ust-Ilimsk to inter her ashes. However, what unfolds over the two-month journey is more complex; the narrator, an autofictional version of Oksana, meditates on grief, memory, and fraught mother-daughter dynamics while reconciling her sexuality, place in Russian society, and identity as an artist.

The impetus for the narrative, on the surface, is the mother’s illness from breast cancer. The narrator chronicles the new patterns of life while her mother’s body was shutting down. She lived in her mother’s apartment, slept head-to-feet each night, diligently emptied and sanitized a bedpan, and noticed the space’s changing odor. The narrator secured her mother a place in hospice for her final days, identified her body in the morgue, and began the logistically complicated process of laying her to rest. Yet, her mother’s death is not the original wound. Rather, it reopens one scabbed over but never fully healed: “The wound is there not because she didn’t survive, but because she existed at all” (21).

A single mother and factory worker, she had a series of abusive relationships with men who exposed both women to violence growing up. Despite her mother’s harsh exterior—undeniably shaped by the Russian political context in which she lived—and inability to show affection, the narrator still describes her mother with love and longing. She reflects: “I felt my mother as a space. A matrix. A place. After her death this place disappeared. The world itself didn’t disappear, but the complex symbolic network that had allowed me to orient myself using my surroundings was gone” (66).

Anxiously journeying far distances with an egg-shaped urn and confronting the simultaneously bureaucratic and painful nature of death, the narrator grapples with childhood memories, generational trauma, and her lesbian identity—putting each under a microscope and examining the intricate ways they connect.

The novel is deeply introspective and fragmented, weaving together personal experience with broader reflections on art, literature, philosophy, and theory. The hybrid structure allows Vasyakina to analyze the relationships between mother and daughter, artist and art in a distinct manner—one that compares to the literature of Maggie Nelson and Maria Stepanova, among others. Prose breaks into free verse and essay-like asides. References to Louise Bourgeois, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, Susan Sontag, and the ​​Greek myth of Philomela ground Wound in a broader feminist tradition. While evocative, these elements sometimes disrupt the narrative’s overarching flow and might not resonate with readers who prefer a more traditional structure. Nevertheless, this approach mirrors the nonlinear nature of grief—where past and present blur and coherence feels increasingly elusive.

Vasyakina’s exploration of queerness stands out, particularly at a time when LGBTQ+ “propaganda” is now illegal in Russia. The author illuminates prejudiced rhetoric in an opening scene where, en route to collect her mother’s ashes, distant acquaintances lament “those queers” in the West, “prancing around in sparkly underwear” and believe sex education should be replaced with teaching kindergarteners how to hold a Kalashnikov rifle to prepare for potential wars instead (9). The narrator asks them to be quiet, given the occasion, and only later do readers learn she has a wife in Moscow.

Throughout the novel, the narrator voices her internalized homophobia, a belief she must disentangle as she ages. What she first experiences as the erotic, expansive excitement she felt gazing at another girl’s body—“It was all like a tender lozenge that I wanted to put in my mouth” (64)—the narrator later regards as frightening: “In the bathroom I undressed. On the gusset of the underwear I’d bought specifically for travel shone a large clear spot. I felt hurt by myself. . . In little Ust-Ilimsk lesbians did not exist” (94).

Although she vocalizes her initial confusion and shame, she later reconciles and confidently embodies her lesbian identity, despite the challenges it creates for her in Russian society which renders her as “half-woman” or “half-person.” An attractive butch in a club has a gaze like a key that makes her want to “go limp and open” (95). Later, she describes her wife as “a complex, rich landscape” with a “warm, wide gaze that gathers me into itself as though I were a tiny insect and her gaze a drop of oozing warm honey” (138); she feels such affection for her that the world “trembles and transforms” (198).

While Vasyakina should be commended for writing as a lesbian so openly (and autobiographically) when doing so in Russia is increasingly dangerous, her narrator has a darker side worth examining. She is abrasive, flawed, and, at times, deeply unsettling. An early reference to a former girlfriend accusing her of rape is particularly jarring, especially as it is never revisited; instead, she attempts to absolve herself, citing that consent was not part of the culture at the time. This is particularly striking in a novel that otherwise circles back to past behaviors, examining them with increasing clarity and perspective.

Despite its looser narrative structure, Wound is ultimately a raw and deeply affecting narrative. Vasyakina acknowledges that the novel’s meandering nature is by design; the narrator reflects that she is deliberately putting off writing the story’s end because “once I finish the book, the wound will close” (199).

While the world continues to live on after death, Vasyakina notes grief’s unresolved nature: “Our great voyage, mine and Mama’s, from Volzhsky to Ust-Ilimsk was essentially over. But it keeps unfolding inside of me. Like a long road in the night” (222).

In a novel that so closely dissects the mother-daughter dynamic, it is fitting that its narrator addresses the last few pages directly to her mother. While her mother could never say “I love you” to her daughter, the narrator says it to her mother, believing their language is not so different after all, and her mother will finally understand.

Bailey Hosfelt is a lesbian writer and freelance contributor to Sinister Wisdom. She graduated in 2024 with a master’s degree in gender and women’s studies from UW–Madison, where she wrote a thesis on Dyke TV and queer activist infrastructure. Previously, Bailey lived in Brooklyn, New York and worked as a journalist for local newspapers. Bailey lives in Chicago with her partner and their two cats, Hilma and Lieutenant Governor.

A Bookshop of One’s Own: How a group of women set out to change the world
Jane Cholmeley
Mudlark, 2024, 384 pages
$21.99

Reviewed by Michaela Hayes

It is easy to forget that accessing lesbian and feminist literature was once incredibly difficult. Or rather, for me, it is hard to even imagine. I work for a lesbian literary magazine and have completed both a BA and an MSc in literature. I have lived in a world where reading feminist literature isn’t only easy, it’s encouraged. Reading A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley, I’m reminded that I’ve been incredibly lucky. This book serves as a timely reminder as well, as book bans are surging in both the US, where I’m from, and the UK, where this book is set and where I currently live.

A Bookshop of One’s Own is Jane Cholmeley’s account of Silver Moon, a feminist lesbian bookshop she opened with her partner-turned-best-friend (very lesbian indeed), Sue Butterworth. The shop was on Charing Cross Road, a street in central London renowned for its specialist bookshops. Silver Moon was opened with substantial help from the Greater London Council (GLC), a government-funded program that ran from 1965 to 1986. According to Esther Webber of BBC News, the GLC was created in response to a disjointed and disorderly London still reeling from World War II, with the aim to promote prosperity among the population. To the GLC, this included cultural pursuits, which led it to subsidize rents and provide loans for institutions deemed culturally important, such as Silver Moon Women’s Bookshop: “As well as giving greater support to the arts in general, the GLC wanted to give a voice to the unheard, the disregarded, the disadvantaged” (43).

A Bookshop is a sweeping account of Silver Moon from start to finish—Cholmeley covers the inception of the idea for the bookshop, the trials and tribulations of operating a feminist business in a capitalist world, the changing tides of politics in Britain during Thatcher’s reign, and the forces that ultimately forced the bookshop to close. The strength of the book lies in the details. Cholmeley is a self-professed ‘numbers guy’ and, as a result, leads the reader through the nitty gritty of feminist bookselling that might otherwise remain unknown to us. It is one thing to know in theory that Thatcher had a disastrous effect on feminist and justice-oriented endeavors and another entirely to understand the mechanics. Cholmeley makes clear through facts and figures that the shuttering of Silver Moon was due to a confluence of factors, nearly all of them tracing back to the rapid privatization of public services.

Cholmeley’s humor threads through the book and binds it together. Though she recognizes that Silver Moon became an invaluable and world-renowned feminist institution, she makes clear that she and her team weren’t thinking about glory or legacy:

“. . . we were much more concerned with survival and laughter. I want this to be our record. A record of the joy—of seeing favorite authors prosper; the awe—of welcoming a heroine superstar author to the shop; the fun—of thinking up subversive merchandise or rewarding ourselves with outrageously boozy Christmas dinners; the anger—of having to clean the carpet from a wanker’s sperm; the political defiance—as we rainbowed-up the Charing Cross Road and fought Section 28; the daily grind—of learning to run a business; the tensions—around politics, personalities and priorities” (3).

With this book, Cholmeley succeeds in her mission; indeed, A Bookshop of One’s Own makes plain all of the above while also shedding light on the rapidly changing political landscape of Britain under Thatcher. Silver Moon closed in 2001, but its legacy lives on in ways that we will never know the extent of. However, this book helps to fill in some of the blanks. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of feminist bookselling, especially younger people such as myself who have a hard time imagining the world pre-internet when access to information was far more restricted. This book is especially relevant today as, unfortunately, right-wing governments intent on erasing queer and racial history surge all over the world.

Michaela Hayes is a writer, researcher, and, above all, a reader. She’s currently living in Edinburgh, where she just finished a master’s in Literature & Modernity, in which she focused on posthuman feminism. She’s currently gearing up for another winter in Scotland, so if you have gay book recommendations, send them to Michaelahayes225 at gmail dot com.

We Set the Night on Fire: Igniting the Gay Revolution
Martha Shelley
Chicago Review Press, 2023, 224 pages
$27.99

Coming Out, Becoming Ourselves: Lesbian Stories from the Daughters of Bilitis, 1969-1999
Lois Johnson and Sarah Boyer with Laura Catanzaro
Savvy Press, 2024, 302 pages
$21.95

Reviewed by Julia M. Allen

Two important new books chronicle the deep lesbian feminist histories often occluded by our June celebrations of parades and rainbows. Reading Martha Shelley’s We Set the Night on Fire in tandem with Lois Johnson and Sarah Boyer’s Coming Out, Becoming Ourselves, one becomes aware of the linkages between the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) and upstart groups such as the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Radicalesbians, linkages that led to increased lesbian activism and visibility. Johnson and Boyer offer a history of the Boston chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, while Shelley narrates her own development from studious daughter to militant writer and strategist in the radical feminist and gay rights movements.

Both books began in a shared moment in 1969. On June 28, two women from Boston arrived in New York to consult with DOB member Martha Shelley about starting a chapter. (Although readers may find it confusing that the names in the two accounts do not match, this is an artifact of the era, when women often used pseudonyms in lesbian organizations, as a matter of protection.) Shelley took them on a tour of Greenwich Village, whereupon they ran smack dab into the Stonewall riot. This alarmed the Bostonians, although Shelley dismissed the uproar, thinking it was a protest against the war in Vietnam.

At that point in the books, the two narratives diverge. We learn that when Shelley realized what they had witnessed, she began agitating for a response, and a month later, five hundred people marched in protest against the police raids on gay and lesbian bars. Johnson and Boyer say simply, “[The trip to New York] was the same weekend as the Stonewall uprising.”

After providing readers with a brief summary of the political climate in the US during the 1950s and the founding of the DOB in 1955 by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Johnson and Boyer devote the first half of their book to describing, with justifiable pride, the thirty-plus years of the Boston DOB, explaining the range of activities offered by the group and the political and educational work done by members. They focus on the most significant—the “rap” groups, where participants could talk about any aspect of lesbian life in a congenial atmosphere. They also point to the joyous Thanksgiving dinners hosted for years by Johnson and her partner Sheri Barden, offering community to those whose families of origin may have been less welcoming. Following this overview, Johnson and Boyer give us glimpses into the lives of DOB members, offering over fifteen edited transcripts of oral history interviews, almost all now with real names. Many of the stories follow a recognizable arc, from trauma, fear, and loneliness to safety in the DOB. The book is generously illustrated with color photos.

Like Johnson and Boyer, Martha Shelley also takes us back in time, narrating her own pre-Stonewall life in New York City, documenting the crescendo of humiliations endured by girls as they reached adolescence and thus setting the scene for her subsequent actions. From there, she traces the routes of her activism as it exploded after the post-Stonewall march she had instigated. She was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front; she joined Rita Mae Brown and others in carrying out the Lavender Menace action at the National Organization for Women’s Second Congress to Unite Women; she wrote for and typeset Come Out!, the publication of the Gay Liberation Front; she organized women to protest the incarceration of Angela Davis at the Women’s House of Detention; and then she moved to Oakland, California, joining Judy Grahn and others in the Women’s Press Collective.

While narrating these extraordinary efforts and achievements, both Shelley and Johnson and Boyer take care to recognize the accomplishments of others. Who among us knew, for instance, that NYU Student Homophile League member and GLF activist Ellen Broidy, with Craig Rodwell, owner of Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, first proposed what have become the annual Pride marches? And how many of us recognized the courage of the rank-and-file DOB members who came out to march carrying the DOB banners?

Although I appreciated the many life stories offered by Johnson and Boyer, I did find certain elements could be repetitive, and variations in voice seem to have been muted in many cases. I also wish that the authors had supplied an index. Likewise, I wish Martha Shelley had included a selection of her writings from the era, as many are now difficult to locate.

Nonetheless, Johnson and Boyer do provide a useful appendix with directions for rap leaders, a timeless document that current organizers can now consult, and Shelley has packaged her own hard-won advice for future activists. They offer these gifts because they know, as we all do, that our work is far from finished.

Julia M. Allen is Professor Emerita, English, Sonoma State University. She is the author of Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins, SUNY Press, 2013 and co-author with Jocelyn H. Cohen of Women Making History: The Revolutionary Feminist Postcard Art of Helaine Victoria Press, Lever Press, 2023.