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.


November 2025 Featured Books:
1. Gendertrash From Hell: The First Print Collection of the Zine That Changed Everything edited by Mirha-Soleil Ross
2. Love and Lightning: A Collection of Queer-Feminist Manifestos edited by Sarah van Binsbergen, Liz Allan, Jessica Gysel, and Sara Kaaman
3. Butch Heterosexuality in Black Caribbean Womanhood: Exploring Gender Performance and Sexuality by Marsha Myrie Obi
4. Biography of a Fiction by Isadora Neves Marques
5. Let the Moon Wobble by Ally Ang
6. Beyond the Lesbian Vampire: Reclaiming the Violent Lesbian in Contemporary Queer Horror by Sam Tabet
7. This Unruly Witness: June Jordan’s Legacy edited by Lauren Muller, Becky Thompson, and Dominique C. Hill
8. I Climb the Mesas: Selected Poems of Paula Gunn Allen by Paula Gunn Allen
9. Beyond the Glittering World: An Anthology of Indigenous Feminisms and Futurisms edited by Stacie Shannon Denetsosie, Kinsale Drake, and Darcie Little Badger
10. Prieta Is Dreaming: A Cuentos-Novela by Gloria E. Anzaldúa


Book descriptions:

Gendertrash From Hell: The First Print Collection of the Zine That Changed Everything edited by Mirha-Soleil Ross: A long-lost zine reveals the secret history of contemporary transgender culture

In 1993, Mirha Soleil-Ross and Xanthra Phillipa MacKay, fed up with a gay scene that rejected trans people and a trans scene that saw no alternative to going “stealth,” began to publish the zine Gendertrash From Hell. Over four issues, they interviewed sex workers and prisoners; they printed collages, soap operas and polemics; they ran regular sections with titles like “Trannies Speak Out” and “Hooker of the Month.” They redefined transsexual culture forever, and their explosive ideas resonate deeply today.

Remastered from the original layouts, this foundational work is now available in book form for the first time, including previously-unseen drafts from the unfinished fifth issue and essays by Trish Salah and Leah Tigers. Irreverent, furious, reckless, sexy, hilarious and incisive, Gendertrash from Hell is here to set all your presuppositions on fire.

Love and Lightning: A Collection of Queer-Feminist Manifestos edited by Sarah van Binsbergen, Liz Allan, Jessica Gysel, and Sara Kaaman: Love and Lightning: A Collection of Queer-Feminist Manifestos is a thematically ordered, inconclusive collection of queer, feminist and queer-feminist manifestos. Girls Like Us Magazine and author Sarah van Binsbergen have composed a publication showcasing the different forms a manifesto might have, from classical, activist formats to more poetic, associative texts. The manifestos highlighted in this book cross borders, forms and disciplines, refuse binary logics, transcend our concepts of time and space and surpass the neoliberal logic.

Love and Lightning does not claim to be a complete, but it rather aims to show the myriad of ways manifestos can be composed, and what their legacy until this day is. It presents manifestos from 1913 until now, divided into eleven chapters, introduced in their socio-historical and geographical contexts, with many from Asia, Africa, Latin-America. Not only does this publication give new insight in the style of the manifesto, it aims to emancipate the reader to propose their own revolution, whether big or small.

Butch Heterosexuality in Black Caribbean Womanhood: Exploring Gender Performance and Sexuality by Marsha Myrie Obi: This critical text proposes new ways of conceptualizing Black womanhood by challenging plantation patriarchal culture, its binary constructions, and methods of Black heterosexual coupling. Black Women’s performances of womanhood are understood from juxtapositions with white idealism resulting in Black womanhood explained negatively or for what it is not, rather than positively and expansively as what it is and could be.

This book contextualizes Black womanhood as it was shaped by historical experiences of plantation, trauma, survival, and most importantly, triumph. Myrie Obi expands upon her theory of butch heterosexuality, which identifies elements of gender presentation commonly marked as masculine. Using Jack Halberstam’s essential work of queer theory, “Female Masculinity,” as a jumping off point, Myrie Obi uses the Commonwealth Caribbean as a site of new inquiry. Butch heterosexuality challenges the patriarchal gender binary and encourages an understanding of sexuality and gender performance as distinct, arguing against a conflation of female masculinity and lesbianism. The result is an alternative way to start conversations about decolonial approaches to understanding (Caribbean) Black women, Black sexuality and Black gender performances.

The book is critical reading for scholar activists and students in the areas of Black Studies or Caribbean Studies, Black Sexualities and Gender Studies, sociology, social work, politics, gender justice and social justice courses.

Biography of a Fiction by Isadora Neves Marques: In Marques’ short-form poems, written during her transition, the practice of biographical writing mirrors her own journey of idealization and becoming

This volume, Biography of a Fiction, is the second poetry collection in English by Portuguese author, filmmaker and artist Isadora Neves Marques (born 1984). What began as diaristic poems on gender, sexuality and reproduction quickly blossomed into a commentary on the role of fiction in writing a biography.

Let the Moon Wobble by Ally Ang: Ang’s debut considers multiple speakers’ journeys through concurrent apocalypses: the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and the rise of fascism. These poems span a wide range of forms and poetic traditions, full of humor, lyricism, and endearing absurdity. They emerge from the speaker’s need to process their emotions and feelings of helplessness. As Ang aches for connection to their communities and lineage in a time of unrelenting isolation, their poems plumb the depths of grief and rage against the systems and institutions that aim to repress and kill queer people of color.

Coursing through Let the Moon Wobble is the deep desire for wildness, freedom from convention and constraint, and to be seen; the speaker often takes up so much space that they’re impossible to ignore or erase. Ultimately, where we land is in a place of hope and possibility where what’s “freshly broken” can give way to blooming. Let the Moon Wobble is a testament to the ways queer joy and community can fuel resistance and allow us to imagine radical new ways of being.

Beyond the Lesbian Vampire: Reclaiming the Violent Lesbian in Contemporary Queer Horror by Sam Tabet: Beyond the Lesbian Vampire is a groundbreaking dive into the pervasive archetype of the violent lesbian, examining this historically problematic figure within cultural and cinematic imagination—from witch to vampire to murderer—and identifying her resurgence in seven critically acclaimed queer horror films of the late 2010s.

Each case study depicts multidimensional lesbian characters trending toward more justifiable narrative reasons for violence. Additionally, this new iteration of the violent lesbian self-consciously references earlier portrayals, including her popular vampiric form, despite shedding her literal fangs. The combination of excessive citation alongside narrative shift gestures towards a reclamation of the violent lesbian within queer horror.

The author weaves textual analysis and scholarly debates around assimilation and the legibility of lesbianism’s queerness to reveal the cultural salience of the violent lesbian, and of the queer and lesbian fears and pleasures she evokes. Beyond the Lesbian Vampire is a vital contribution to lesbian studies, horror studies, queer studies and feminist studies.

This Unruly Witness: June Jordan’s Legacy edited by Lauren Muller, Becky Thompson, and Dominique C. Hill: A collection of bold and tender writing on June Jordan’s multidimensional legacy as a poet, healer, and activist.

This Unruly Witness was curated for people who see love as a life force, who seek a community that can sustain us, who know that “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Celebrating the life and legacy of the poet activist June Jordan, this collection illuminates why we need Jordan more than ever.

Featuring a foreword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, an afterword from Imani Perry, essays, poems, letters, and interviews from internationally acclaimed poets and thinkers such as Angela Davis, Pratibha Parmar, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Naomi Shihab Nye, Afaa M. Weaver, E. Ethelbert Miller, and many other people touched by Jordan’s work.

I Climb the Mesas: Selected Poems of Paula Gunn Allen by Paula Gunn Allen: An overdue retrospective of a pathbreaking feminist Native American poet, with a foreword from activist and educator Lee Francis IV

I Climb the Mesas: Collected Poems of Paula Gunn Allen span the landscapes of the Southwest, excavate popular misunderstandings of Native women through history, and perhaps most importantly shines a light on a foremother of Native poetry, who was herself an icon to feminist legends like Gloria Steinem.

Including forewords from her nephew, activist and educator Lee Francis IV, as well as her daughter, this volume of the Laguna Pueblo poet spans her decades-long career, including hard-to-find, limited edition chapbooks.

Beyond the Glittering World: An Anthology of Indigenous Feminisms and Futurisms edited by Stacie Shannon Denetsosie, Kinsale Drake, and Darcie Little Badger: Rooted in visions of Indigenous futurisms, Beyond the Glittering World proclaims and celebrates a rising generation of Indigenous women and genderqueer storytellers.

The collection brings together twenty-two emerging and established writers whose poems and stories expand the imagination. From a museum heist 177 years in the making, to lyrical explorations of love and loss, to a tale where language itself becomes the force that saves the land, this boundary-breaking, genre-bending anthology illuminates the power of Indigenous voices.

Prieta Is Dreaming: A Cuentos-Novela by Gloria E. Anzaldúa: A generative, genre-bending collection of nineteen intertwined stories by legendary writer, theorist, and activist Gloria E. Anzaldúa.

Best known for Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Gloria E. Anzaldúa was also a prolific fiction writer. Prieta Is Dreaming, a speculative novel-in-stories, follows the precocious Prieta from her childhood in South Texas to college and beyond as she tries to find her way in the world. Imbued with supernatural powers, Prieta traverses time, changes form, explores her desires, and defies convention. Started in the 1970s and revised up until Anzaldúa’s death in 2004, Prieta Is Dreaming comes as a revelation, affirming Anzaldúa’s place at the forefront of contemporary feminist, queer, and border theory, while transforming what we think about both her writing and ourselves. In these nineteen intertwined stories, we find some of Anzaldúa’s most adventurous, inspired ideas about gender, sexuality, and the very nature of existence—as well as a character, la Prieta, as bold and memorable as the book itself.