Two recent collections from queer poets of color put into stark relief the challenges and cruelties of contemporary America. Both collections are elegiac, though in formally different ways. Cyrus Cassells’ eighth collection, The World That the Shooter Left Us, … Read More
Tenderness by Derrick Austin (BOA Editions, 2021). A funny thing about reviewing a book that’s been out for a while is whether and to what extent to consider the critical consensus that has taken shape in the intervening … Read More
The Red Zone: A Love Story by Chloe Caldwell (Soft Skull Press, 2022). When Chloe Caldwell entered her thirties, she was already known for writing three books chronicling the freedom, friendship, financial instability, and personal exploration of her … Read More
Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity by Artress Bethany White (New Rivers Press, 2022). Early in Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity, Artress Bethany White writes that in 2016, as she was planning a … Read More
By the Bridge or By the River? by Amy C. Roma (C&R Press, 2021). “Refugees didn’t just escape a place. They had to escape a thousand memories until they’d put enough time and distance between them and their … Read More
Shit Cassandra Saw by Gwen E. Kirby (Penguin Books, 2022). When I was in high school, my friends and I plotted revenge. Some strange guy had groped one of us in the hallway and she was gutted. To … Read More
Dear Damage: Essays by Ashley Marie Farmer (Sarabande Books, 2022). Twenty-eight years ago this April, the musician Kurt Cobain jumped the fence at a Los Angeles recovery center, where he’d been an inpatient for just one day. He … Read More
Lost Letters and Other Animals by Carrie Bennett (Black Lawrence Press, 2021); Besiege Me by Nicholas Wong (Noemi Press, 2021); Returning the Sword to the Stone by Mark Leidner (Fonograf Editions, 2021). You can tell a lot about … Read More
Muriel Leung, Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books, 2021). When bees swarm, it is as a function of reproduction. The hive has become too crowded, so the workers raise a new queen, and just before the usurper hatches, … Read More
The Dream Women Called by Lori Wilson (Autumn House Press, 2021). Lori Wilson’s second poetry collection, The Dream Women Called, focuses on a woman’s experience—girlhood expectations, love and sexuality, motherhood and daughterhood, and parental inadequacies, among other things. … Read More
Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (Algonquin Books, 2021) The powerful bond between mother and daughter in Kaitlyn Greenidge’s novel Libertie is established in the book’s first line: “I saw my mother raise a man from the dead.” The year is … Read More
Minus One by Doris Iarovici (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2020). Moments of regret permeate the stories in Doris Iarovici’s new book, Minus One, a collection of studies in grief, resilience, and the games we play with ourselves … Read More