Wild Shrew Literary Review (WSLR) is Sinister Wisdom’s online book review project. To complement the longer list of suggested books available for review, each month we feature a selection of books being released that month. If you would like to write a review, or if you would like to be added to the WSLR email list to receive the monthly complete book list with book descriptions, please email the WSLR editor, Chloe Berger, at chloe at sinisterwisdom dot org.


October 2025 Featured Books:
1. Essential Poems by Pat Parker by Pat Parker, edited by SaraEllen Strongman
2. What Can I Ask: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 by Elana Dykewomon
3. Five Star White Trash: A Memoir of Fraud and Family by Georgiann Davis
4. The Salvage by Anbara Salam
5. The Natural Order of Things: Poems by Donika Kelly
6. Dandelion: A Memoir in Essays by Danielle Bainbridge
7. Hauntings by Vernon Lee
8. We Are Each Other’s Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities edited by Jaimee A. Swift, Td Tso, and Rachel Kuo
9. Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History edited by Karli Wurzelbacher
10. Claude Cahun: Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) by Claude Cahun, illustrated by Marcel Moore, translated by Susan de Muth


Book descriptions:

Essential Poems by Pat Parker by Pat Parker, edited by SaraEllen Strongman: Renowned African-American, lesbian-feminist poet and performer Pat Parker wrote five collections of poetry during her lifetime, Jonestown & Other Madness, Movement in Black, Womanslaughter, Pit Stop, and Child of Myself. Parker’s poems appeared in numerous journals, newspapers, and anthologies, and are collected in The Complete Works of Pat Parker. Known for her electric performances of her poems, including on the album Where Would I Be Without You from Olivia Records and Lesbian Concentrate, Parker enchanted audiences with her fire for justice and her belief in change. Parker’s most loved poems are now collected in this accessible volume. Essential Poems by Pat Parker introduces new audiences to Parker’s fire, passion, tenderness, and vision for the world.

What Can I Ask: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 by Elana Dykewomon: Elana Dykewomon’s poetry bears witness to the lives of lesbians. She asks and demands that we be responsible and responsive to one another; that we bring care, compassion, accountability, and love in the proper proportions. These poems help us understand the contours of sexism, homophobia, racism, and antisemitism. They are poems that illuminate what we can ask from and offer one another. Drawing on Dykewomon’s impressive body of poetry, What Can I Ask: New and Selected Poems 1975-2015 assembles into a single volume poems from Dykewomon’s three published collections, They Will Know Me By My Teeth (Megaera Press, 1976), Fragments from Lesbos (Diaspora Distribution, 1981), and Nothing Will Be As Sweet as the Taste (Onlywomen Press, 1995), as well as a selection of newer, uncollected poems. Dykewomon continues asking questions and reaching for answers, demonstrating the power of poetry to comfort and enrage, inspire and arouse.

Five Star White Trash: A Memoir of Fraud and Family by Georgiann Davis: An unforgettable journey from seventh-grade dropout to celebrated professor

Her family was white, but not the right kind of white. They were five star white trash. They borrowed money and tried to buy class.

In this unflinching response to JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Georgiann Davis guides us through her extraordinary life, from weighing almost 300 pounds by fifth grade, to dropping out of school in the seventh and on to selling weed out of her “monkey shit green” Plymouth Neon. A tall, fat girl who only wore boy’s clothing, she grew up with a turbulent family outside of Chicago: the larger-than-life mother who looked like Farah Fawcett, the father who understood cars better than children, the brother whose drug use went unchecked, and the Greek grandparents who could only love her from afar. Then there was the shocking medical secret kept from her–one that upended everything she thought she knew about herself, gender, and the human body.

With unflinching candor and dark humor, Davis tells her ‘stranger-than-fiction’ life story in a brave voice that will have readers rooting for her. As Davis chronicles her surprising journey from middle-school dropout to professor, she reveals how whiteness colored her family’s struggles. She connects her personal experiences of medical abuse, fatphobia, and fear of the intersex body with incisive critiques of whiteness, the opioid crisis, and gendered and queer oppression. Faced with unimaginable setbacks—identity theft, home eviction, medical trauma, and family betrayal—Davis relentlessly pursued education. It was this quest that transformed her life, giving her the tools to tell her own story. The result is a deeply moving memoir which complicates our understanding of upward mobility and familial love.

The Salvage by Anbara Salam: A twisting, gothic literary thriller sure to delight fans of Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield, The Wonder by Emma Donaghue, and The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters.

It is 1962, and Marta Khoury, a trailblazing marine archaeologist, has been called to Cairnroch, a small island off the east coast of Scotland. A Victorian shipwreck, dragged from arctic waters, holds the remains of a celebrated explorer and the treasures of his final expedition. But on her first dive down to the ship, Marta becomes convinced she has seen a dark figure lurking amid the wreckage.

When the Cuban Missile Crisis and the deep chill of a record-breaking winter keeps Marta stranded on Cairnroch, she forms a relationship with Elsie, a local woman working in the island’s only hotel. When the ship’s artefacts inexplicably disappear, Marta and Elsie have to brave the freezing conditions to search for the missing objects before anyone else catches on. As something eerie seems to follow her at every step, Marta must confront if the haunting is a figment of her imagination, the repercussions from a terrible mistake from her past, or if something more sinister is at play that will trap her and everyone on the island—and their secrets—in an icy wilderness.

The Natural Order of Things: Poems by Donika Kelly: Observe the baby hippo,
early born in hay over concrete,
stumbling and new in its enclosure:

Taut skin and fat and awkward steps—
it stumbles under a fluorescent sun
and nearly into the white walls.

Hippo baby, little river horse,
you should be in a river.
O Donika, you should be in love.

—from “A Poem to Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things”

What does a life look like on the other side of survival, and can the one who survived come to recognize that she did?

Donika Kelly’s poetry is known for its resonant, unflinching confrontations with trauma and inheritance, translated through myth and nature. The Natural Order of Things expands these explorations into a new realm: one defined by joy and connection. It is an ode to companionship with people, animals, and our planet, and reveals the reparative power of intimacy. In poems inventive, playful, and formally nimble, Kelly pays homage to the voices and people she comes from, the songs of her lineage. Other poems follow the early stirrings of love to erotic transcendence with the lover and the self. Throughout, Kelly finds mirror and marvel in nature, art, and precious friendships. Though it once seemed impossible, she realizes a surprising place for herself, a rightness in the larger world.

The Natural Order of Things is a brilliant and moving book, one that reaches toward equilibrium and something like happiness.

Dandelion: A Memoir in Essays by Danielle Bainbridge: Dandelion: A Memoir in Essays is a profoundly personal exploration of mental health, identity, and survival. Through a collection of essays, poetry, and reflections, the author shares their journey as a Black, queer woman grappling with chronic illness, grief, and societal pressures. Themes of self-love, resilience, and navigating life's challenges are central to the narrative, as the author confronts the complexities of race, gender, and mental health. The work invites readers into a raw and emotional journey, offering a universal message about survival and the power of finding strength in the face of adversity.

Hauntings by Vernon Lee: Bewitching ghost stories from seminal short story writer Vernon Lee.

“My ghosts are what you call spurious ghosts, of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains, and have haunted, among others, my own…”

Shipwrecked before a remote Italian coastal village, a young girl discovers the ability to command love and incite madness; a Polish historian is drawn to the enigmatic allure of a medieval Duchess with a deadly past; a painter, hired to capture the likeness of a reclusive couple, slowly uncovers a mysterious love affair; and a man with a voice that is as deadly as it is beautiful eats away at the health of those who hear him sing, troubling a composer years later.

Once described by Henry James as being “as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent,” Vernon Lee’s ghost stories haunt as much as they reveal an obsession with art, architecture, and deadly, queer desires. Even the smallest vibration from the past signals danger for the characters in Hauntings: from the emanations of old houses and old books to the discovery of old portraits, objects come alive and worm into the minds of the living.

In conversation with
Gretchen Felker-Martin is a Massachusetts-based bestselling horror author and film critic. Her debut novel, Manhunt, was named the #1 Best Book of 2022 by Vulture, and was one of the Best Horror Novels of 2022 by Esquire, Library Journal, and Paste. Her sophomore novel, Cuckoo, debuted on the USA Today bestseller list. You can read her fiction and film criticism on Patreon and in TIME, The Outline, Nylon, and more.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. Her queer horror novelette Helen House was named one of the Best LGBTQ Books of 2022 by NBC News. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle, an assistant fiction editor at Foglifter, and the former managing editor of TriQuarterly. Her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and others. Some of her culture writing can be found in The Cut, The A.V. Club, Vulture, Refinery29, and Vice, and she previously worked as a restaurant reporter for Eater NY. She was a 2023-2024 Tin House Reading Fellow and a 2023 Lambda writer in residence. She is featured in the Dzanc Books anthology Be Gay, Do Crime.

We Are Each Other’s Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities edited by Jaimee A. Swift, Td Tso, and Rachel Kuo: A major anthology that illuminates historical and contemporary solidarities between Black and Asian feminists.

A collaborative project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, We Are Each Other’s Liberation envisions a cross-racial and internationalist politics that explicitly addresses solidarity between Black and Asian feminists. Bringing together organizers, artists, journalists, poets, novelists, and more, this collection introduces readers to new ways of understanding and reflecting on race and feminism.

Drawing out lessons from the revolutionary work of movement forebearers—including the Combahee River Collective, Claudia Jones, Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, and Third World Women’s Alliance as well as struggles today—We Are Each Other’s Liberation offers an urgent call for the just future we might build together.

Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History edited by Karli Wurzelbacher: With the order for the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, Emma Stebbins became the first woman to earn a public sculpture commission from the city of New York. Today, this monument is a beloved global icon, while the full scope of Stebbins’s history-making life and work is virtually unknown. Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History recognizes her as one of the most significant American sculptors of the nineteenth century.

From 1857 to 1870, Stebbins created innovative marble and bronze sculptures while living in Rome with renowned Shakespearean actress Charlotte Cushman, who championed her career. Stebbins modeled inventive and incisive interpretations of literary and biblical subjects, unprecedented allegories of American industry, and notable portraits of her friends and family. When Bostonians installed her statue of educator Horace Mann on the grounds of the Massachusetts State House in 1865, she became the first woman in the country to complete an outdoor bronze monument. Stebbins—a professional sculptor in a female marriage—reimagined what a woman’s life could be in the mid-nineteenth century. Her art speaks to some of the most compelling issues of her time and ours, including gender and sexuality, ecology and industry, and political conflict and public art.

This volume presents scholarly essays by an international group of curators and historians and reflections on Stebbins’s work by contemporary artists alongside stunning reproductions representing the breadth of her career, as well as images of several newly discovered sculptures. Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History accompanies the nationally touring museum exhibition of the same name.

Claude Cahun: Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) by Claude Cahun, illustrated by Marcel Moore, translated by Susan de Muth: Back in print after over a decade: the playful and genre-shattering memoir of a beloved surrealist known for her gender-bending portraiture

First published in 1930 by anti-fascist, avant-garde publisher Éditions du Carrefour in Paris as Aveux non Avenus, Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is Claude Cahun’s wildly radical answer to an invitation to write a memoir. Shattering the very premise of the “memoir”—the singularity of identity—into sharp and prismatic fragments, Cahun assembles an ever-mutating inquiry into the instability of “self” and its many masks.

Using a multitude of forms (fables, jokes, aphorisms, letters, dialogues, dreams, hymns, pronouncements, etc.), to plumb the subjects of desire, love, gender, sex, fear, faith, religion and vanity (among others), Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is a tour-de-force work of resistance: it provokes the reader to enter the capacious, provocative, playful and deeply imaginative space constructed by Cahun in defiance of all categorization, to repudiate a delimited, censured world and embrace, instead, the outcasts and cast-offs, the unknowable and the unknown.

Thoughtfully redesigned to emulate the original artist’s book, this revised edition of the out-of-print English translation by Susan de Muth—originally published in the UK by the Tate in 2007 and in the US by MIT Press in 2008—includes novelist and critic Pierre Mac Orlan’s original 1930 preface along with contemporary essays by scholar Amelia Groom and translator de Muth. Almost 100 years old, Cancelled Confessions is not only prescient, but urgent: “It is not enough to be vanquished, you also have to turn defeat to your advantage.”