Ophelia
S.M. Namkoong
2025, 434 pages
$21.00

Reviewed by Rory Frasch

S.M. Namkoong’s debut novel, Ophelia, is a fantastic take on the gothic genre. Ophelia is set in a sleepy Maine town after World War I. The story follows Lawrence “LJ” Stoner, a Midwestern painter returning to the United States after a few years abroad. It is an atmospheric novel with a slow pace. LJ’s return to America is tainted when mysterious deaths begin to follow those she interacts with. Namkoong explores the morality of classic vampire stories with a sympathetic, yet critical gaze.

LJ and Ophelia are the highlight of the novel. It is important to understand Ophelia not as an action-forward book. Rather, it is a novel exploring morality and the lack thereof. At its core, Ophelia operates as a conversation about monstrosity. Ophelia’s outlook on life is, at times, horrifying. It is understandable how Lawrence is drawn in by her, despite being conflicted. “Ophelia was a killer, yes, but not a monster. Not to Lawrence. She had met men more monstrous by leaps and bounds. Surely someone capable of such love could not be a being of evil” (344).

Namkoong draws out the plot slowly, building tension with each chapter until Lawrence and Ophelia’s first encounter. Lawrence’s entrancement with Ophelia, therefore, feels gradual. Namkoong’s beautiful prose allows the reader to fall in love with Ophelia, the vampiric antagonist, as well as with Lawrence. Hidden beneath the veneer of romantic lines lies Ophelia’s manipulation. Lawrence’s subdued perspective on the world and eventual need for a stronger hand propel this plot. Her perspectives on gender conformity seem to be shaped by a largely isolated upbringing. This helps to ground the novel within this specific time period, in contrast with the immortal character of Ophelia.

The ending of the novel was satisfying, if bittersweet. Namkoong challenges her readers to question the ethics of survival, in all its forms. In one of Lawrence’s final conversations with Ophelia, she says, “That’s only natural, isn’t it? That’s all you know how to do. To consume. You just consume until there’s nothing left. Then, you move on” (412). Lawrence’s question is one that the novel does not answer. How much responsibility can one attribute to a person’s immorality? The answer is up to the reader.

Rory Frasch is a student at Bryn Mawr College majoring in history. She is a summer intern at Sinister Wisdom.

Nymph
Sofia Montrone
Avid Reader Press, 2026, 256 pages
$27.00

Reviewed by Molly Hunken

Nymph is a startlingly beautiful lesbian coming-of-age story from debut novelist Sofia Montrone, which masterfully combines the visceral sapphic yearning of Chloe Michelle Howarth’s Sunburn with the gorgeous and iconic northern Italian setting of André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name. Readers will be drawn in by the beauty of the protagonist Leo’s small-town life, unable to look away from the unfolding events of her family drama, and moved by the skillfully articulated realities of Leo’s first experience with all-consuming sapphic love.

When the novel begins, we’re introduced to Leo: an inquisitive ten-year-old living and working as a maid at her family’s agritourism hotel in northern Italy. As the hotel has been in Leo’s mother’s family for an entire century, Leo and her younger brother, Max, have visited every summer, catering to guests along with her grandmother, Nonna Tina, and loyal hotel staff, Davide, while enjoying the beauty of the property’s location on a mountainside surrounded by olive and lemon trees in the summer and vineyard grapes in the fall. Leo—short for Leonora—passes her days cleaning the hotel’s rooms while collecting left-behind belongings for her own personal treasure trove (a faux pearl earring, a lock of hair) and playing with her younger brother, Max, with whom she shares everything, including a bedroom. While Leo’s mother wastes away from an unknown mental and physical illness, unable to leave her bed more days than not, Leo’s father, an American professor, recounts to the siblings the tales of Odysseus: he details the fateful trojan horse, Odysseus’ clever escape from the cyclops, and the stories his wife, Penelope, was forced to fabricate of her philandering husband to justify his continued absence to their son, Telemachus. All the while, Leo’s father invites Leo and her brother’s questions and curiosities about these stories, telling the truth even when it seems rather brutal. Nobody comments on the ways in which the dynamics of this classic Greek epic seem to parallel their own family.

Eight summers later, following a great tragedy for Leo’s family, Leo meets Dolores, an American luthier-in-training a year older than her, who begins working at the hotel at Leo’s side. With her shaved head and boyish clothes, Dolores is compelling to Leo in a way which begins as a curious friendship and slowly builds into a deep and undeniable love of Dolores’ entire self, both body and mind. As Leo navigates difficulties with her family—namely, her brother’s apparent newfound disinterest in consciously absorbing the world as he used to and the town’s rumor mill surrounding her father—Dolores serves as a constant reprieve to which she finds herself continually returning and with whom she feels she can share anything, even when it disgraces her or her family in some way. Although, as their love story continues—Leo likening their mutual infatuation with that of Achilles and Patroclus of The Iliad and Dolores simultaneously comparing Leo to the nymphs of Greek mythology and a grasshopper nymph in the midst of evolution—summer’s end draws continually nearer.

Leo’s journey is incredibly relatable to all queer women whose understanding of their sexuality came on suddenly, and readers will find themselves deeply understanding her growing love for Dolores while treasuring her awkward process of lesbian coming of age. Montrone has created a complex family dynamic which undergirds every decision Leo makes, approaching topics of addiction, mental illness, and obsession with tact and care. With its beautifully described yearning and strong motifs of loyalty and temptation of the Greek epics, as well as growth associated with insects and nature (including its idyllic setting), Nymph can and should join the ranks of classic sapphic novels and is a perfect read for slow summer days.

Molly Hunken is a writer and editor based in Chicago, Illinois, and one of Sinister Wisdom’s interns for summer 2026. She loves to read literary fiction, horror, queer stories, narrative nonfiction, and contemporary history, and currently works as a bookseller at Unabridged Bookstore.

Queer Modernism: 1900–1950
Edited by Susanne Gaensheimer, Isabella Malz, and Anke Kempkes
Hirmer Publishers, 2026, 336 pages
$55.00

Reviewed by Angela Acosta

Queer Modernism: 1900–1950 is a visually engaging and academically rigorous exhibition catalogue for the titular exhibition at the K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, a premier modern art museum in Düsseldorf, Germany. The book showcases over one hundred works across artistic media, literature, and archival materials from queer artists with the aim of reasserting the connection between queer perspectives and the development of European modernist movements. The first exhibition of its kind, Queer Modernism: 1900–1950 represents the culmination of curatorial and archival work to place “desire, gender, and sexuality, as well as the politics of self-representation, at the center of [queer artists’] artistic practice” (10).

For those interested in queer and feminist art history, exhibition catalogues fill an important gap in scholarship on modern visual and plastic arts. In addition to the immediate benefit of providing wider access to works that were on display for a limited time in Germany, this bilingual English and German catalogue is organized into thematic chapters that build on previous studies of the interconnected queer modernist networks between Europe and North America. Given that the catalogue features a large ensemble of artists, including Rosa Bonheur, Richmond Barthé, Hannah Höch, and Gregorio Prieto, Queer Modernism: 1900–1950 can be read alongside other studies about individual artists. It also complements recent scholarship like Melanie Micir’s edited volume Contemporary Queer Modernism (Routledge, 2025) and Jonathan Katz’s About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art (The Monacelli Press, 2024).

A unifying thread across the artistic works included in the catalogue is the representation of the human body. These works depict a wide array of homoerotic longing, intimacy, gender nonconformity, queer politics, and what David J. Getsy coins as “queer abstraction.” The artists play with angles, movement, the placement and proximity of the figures, color saturation, and the gaze of the viewer. Most of the works featured are paintings, photographs, and statues. However, I was expecting to find more letters between artists, newspaper illustrations, and ephemera to better situate the artists within their cultural contexts.

Jonathan D. Katz suggests that queer modernist artistic creations function as “laboratories for possible futures” (44) through which to envision political and social change. The six thematic chapters span pastoral themes, Sapphic modernism, surrealism, abstraction, intimate networks, and queer resistance. Each contributing author offers historically grounded context and art historical methods for understanding sexual difference during and prior to the modernist period. The artists selected for inclusion represent a diverse cross-section of modernist canonical and non-canonical figures. This includes Richmond Barthé’s sculptures of the Black male body and Gladys Bentley’s drag performances in the “Modern Arcadia” chapter, as well as abstract works by Marlow Moss and antifascist art by Hannah Höch and Claude Cahun. I hope that future queer modernist exhibitions will continue to feature a diverse array of modernist works beyond the usual suspects of American, French, and German artists.

Queer Modernism: 1900–1950 offers a compelling exploration of the shared influences and positionalities of artists and the cultural milieux that shaped their work within the queer modernist movement. The catalogue approximates the original placement of archival documents, photographs, and paintings as they first appeared in the rooms of the museum. The essays offer a cohesive and engrossing narrative that brings together groups of artists, such as sapphic networks in Paris, illustrated in a map drawn by Natalie Barney, with additional critical and biographical information about the artists and their work. I was drawn to Anke Kempkes’s intermedial analysis of Louise Janin’s work and how the abstract motifs present in L’Après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun, 1925) were inspired by a poem that was adapted into a ballet performance. Janin’s work is an excellent reminder of the dynamic array of artistic media and sources of inspiration found in queer modernist artwork. The quotations placed alongside the artwork aptly capture key ideas from the chapter essays, such as Natalie Barney’s declaration from Letters to a Woman I Have Known (1899): “My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one. […] people call it unnatural, all I can say is it’s always come naturally to me” (63).

Queer Modernism: 1900–1950 is a carefully crafted, intersectional book that stands on its own outside of its namesake exhibit, and it would make an excellent addition to library and personal collections.

You can listen to curator Anke Kempkes discuss the exhibition on YouTube here.

Angela Acosta, Ph.D. (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. She researches twentieth-century Spanish women writers and the modernist literary canon. She is co-editor with Dr. Rebecca Haidt of the Spanish Sapphic Modernity special issue of Feminist Modernist Studies (vol. 7, issue 3).

Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry
Edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone
The MIT Press, 2024, 264 pages
$32.95

Reviewed by Isabelle Drake

Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry is a collection of vibrant essays by a diverse group of key feminist avant-garde poets. It focuses on community, philosophy, resistance, race, class, gender, and sexuality, among other topics. The collection is edited by Marcella Durand, an essayist, translator, and award-winning poet, along with Jennifer Firestone, an author, poet, editor, and professor.

In the brilliant introduction to the collection, Durand and Firestone define the meaning of the word “influence,” moving away from its historical hierarchical connotations and tailoring it to fit broader, more diverse applications. They also discuss and acknowledge the racist traditions of historical avant-garde poetry and center the book to celebrate people of color, queer, and transgender radical avant-garde feminist writers.

Eileen Myles, Nicole Brossard, Harryette Mullen, and Sawako Nakayasu are four of the writers offering their perspectives on influence and feminist avant-garde poetry. A memorable moment regarding how writers influence each other was in Harryette Mullen’s “Props to My Peeps: A Roll Call” and Erica Hunt’s “Writing By Hand—Beginning.” In these two essays, we see the themes of collaboration and influence as the authors discuss an archival photo of “The Sisterhood,” which was a networking organization of Black women who were writers and activists during the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s. They spoke about how the movement influenced their writing journeys and described the conversations it invoked between the two writers.

In both “Nexus: Feminist Avant-Garde Poetics” by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and “The Long Arc” by Brenda Coultas, the authors ask, “Do we have agency over what influences us?” They believe that in some ways we can control what influences us. We can control what media we consume, the people we surround ourselves with, the establishments we give our business to, and, overall, we can control what we create. However, there are events in life that we have zero control over, such as our upbringings.

For writers, poets, and feminists, this book will incite useful ideas regarding what personally influences you, as well as being more discerning regarding the influences that you can control and choose to surround yourself with. Everything is influence. Every action is influenced by the one before, and that action will influence the next. Writers are influenced by what they read, where they are from, the lives they lived, the good and bad decisions they have made, and, most importantly, the community that surrounds them. If you are a writer or poet dabbling in the avant-garde, feminist ideas, collaboration, or want to be more aware of what influences you, this collection will prove to be outstandingly helpful and inspirational. Likewise, the essential reading, listening, and watch lists that these inspirational writers provide are invaluable.

Isabelle Drake is a writer and poet who lives in Savannah, Georgia, and has lived all around the world. She is a graduating senior at the Savannah College of Art and Design, getting her BFA in Writing. She has focused her writing and studies on feminist and lesbian topics.

To the Moon and Back
Eliana Ramage
Avid Reader Press, 2025, 448 pages
$30.00

Reviewed by Sam Carter

To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage is an absolutely stunning novel following Steph Harper from adolescence to adulthood as she runs from the dissatisfaction of her life and toward the farthest possible destination—the moon. Largely beginning in the Cherokee Nation’s capital, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, Ramage’s debut novel spares no expense in taking readers on a journey spanning across geographies, time, and of course, space. As a sucker for messy and occasionally frustrating queer characters, To the Moon and Back offered all the sorrows and joys I was looking for. With NASA having just launched their first mission to the moon in over fifty years, there is no better time to dive into this book!

What to say about this novel that can possibly do it justice? To the Moon and Back is incredibly rich, holding a mirror to readers and characters alike and challenging us to reflect upon our pasts and how we’ve come to understand them. Particularly Steph, our lesbian lead, is fantastically messy and self-focused. As she moves throughout the story, every bit of resistance Steph faces is met with a greater assertion of control. Paralleling the incredibly strict guidelines to astronaut candidacy, Steph attempts to mold her life in the way she desperately wants it to be. Her near apathetic focus creates a shaky fabrication of reality at constant risk of collapse.

Ramage additionally foregrounds a number of other women throughout the story such as Steph’s sister Kayla, her mother Hannah, and her college girlfriend, Della, weaving together intersections and diversions regarding race, class, sexuality, and indigeneity among them. From those uncritically nostalgic toward their Cherokee heritage, to those who want nothing to do with it, to those who were divorced from their history and culture in infancy, Ramage displays an amalgamation of experience that never feels too convoluted or rushed.

Della is introduced to the novel near the end of Part One, bringing a refreshing narrative that contrasts Steph’s growing self-obsession. Della, separated from her Cherokee heritage by a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) when she was a baby, strives to reaffirm authority over her life. Enacted in 1978, the ICWA was a piece of legislation intended to disrupt the forceful separation of indigenous families and communities, granting tribes jurisdiction in the fostering and adoption of indigenous children. Della’s and Steph’s narratives immediately collide as they begin college, culminating in illuminating—if tragic—revelations for them both.

Overall, To the Moon and Back is about love and how we internalize and engage with our past in the present. Temporalities are not confined to a strict binary of good and bad, just as love is not isolated to a single notion of purity. Steph’s journey depicts the parallel and intersectional experience of life, in which one’s ambition can act as both a balm, and as a hubris-fuelled form of self-destruction. However, in engaging with the differing cultivations of our pasts, Ramage foregrounds the power of reflection, in which looking back can incite a future bettered by change.

Sam Carter is a butch archivist and MA student at University College Dublin in Ireland. When she’s not reading, you’ll find her listening to dreadfully loud rock music and wandering toward the beach. You can find her on instagram @sam.carter83.

Bloodmercy
I.S. Jones
Copper Canyon Press, 2025, 88 pages
$16.00

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

This debut collection of poetry, Bloodmercy by American/Nigerian poet Itiola S. Jones, is a reimagining and retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel. In the original narrative from the Bible, Adam and Eve, the first humans, are living the life of paradise in the Garden of Eden. They are forbidden to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, but a serpent tempts Eve, and Adam and Eve are cast out from the Garden. God inflicts punishment upon them. For Eve, her punishment means that she will suffer the pains of childbirth and live her days in dutiful obedience to her husband. Together, Adam and Eve bear many children, including Cain and Abel. In the Bible, Cain kills Abel in a fit of jealousy when God prefers Abel’s sacrificial offering to his, thus becoming the first murderer.

“Violence is a failure of communication” (5) is the opening line of this collection. Cain and Abel are reimagined as sisters whose love for each other becomes fraught with envy as they both compete for the attention of their negligent father. In this version of the story, Cain does not kill Abel. Instead, the girls’ bodies blossom as they experience the shame of their mother Eve’s sin in the Garden. The girls come into their own budding sexuality. Bloodmercy follows the sisters, Cain and Abel, as they grow from girlhood into womanhood—becoming women who ultimately discover the limits of power and control, violence and sexuality, faith, death, and mankind’s failed attempts to hold dominion over the world. In another poem, “We Are Soft Between Hours,” a declaration of Cain’s love for her sister, she says: “What pleasure possesses you, / sister, I want for myself. In this night, everything is about the moon— / even her absence, even you. Eventually, someone wants something, / that’s the nature of power” (21).

Bloodmercy was selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 American Poetry Review’s Honickman Prize. Jones is the first woman of color to receive this prestigious award. Nicole Sealey remarks in her introduction to this collection: “. . . Bloodmercy asks, from its opening to closing poems: What does mercy look like? Rather than fully formed renderings, Jones offers composite sketches—images mined from the poet’s sharp and singular vision. With verse from the perspective of Eve, and a thread of poems reimagining Cain and Abel as sisters, Bloodmercy wrestles with the idea of grace, vis-à-vis myth and memory, gender and sexuality, with the utmost urgency” (1).

These poems are located in an evolving remote natural landscape, a mythic realm set in a time between the Old Testament and the modern era. The two girls begin to mature, to gaze toward heaven, and pose questions to God. Within “After the Offering Ritual, Cain Carries Abel Home,” a kind of prelude in Cain’s voice, Jones describes the moment of the sacrificial offering to God. In the Bible, it was the offering ritual that provoked Cain’s jealousy and the murder of his brother. In Jones’s poem, Cain does not slay her sister. Rather, she shows Abel tenderness and mercy after the killing of the sacrificial goat.

We have blood and dirt,
together they make God. And what does mercy look like
between humans? A sister reaching to lift a sister
from the ground. When I say a love that will end us,
I mean ‘mercy.’ Remember, I offered you my hand once.
Push me away if you like (5).

All the voices in these poems are spoken by Cain, Abel, and Eve. However, Bloodmercy focuses, in large part, on the voices of the sisters as they grow into womanhood. “Daddy’s Girl,” again spoken by Cain, begins with an invocation to God. “Lord, forgive me. I am my father’s child: / cunning and arrogant with beauty. / Adam’s first. Daughter prince. / No one beneath God tells me what to do” (15). She continues in this poem with a celebration of her childhood:

I am 8
and can only see my mother for her gender—
exhausted to a numb, wounded, bitter
to the touch. The feminine urge to be
my father’s best boi, I boy’d better
the other boys— peed standing up,
won every game of ‘nut check,’ shot
my first kill by 10 . . . (15).

Jones’s verses discomfort and attempt to startle her readers, as in her poem “Sister’s Keeper”: “I peeled back my skin to unveil a body / Baba would find use in” (10). An understanding of the self through wound is a recurrent theme; these poems lean toward the grotesque. The poet, talking about her sense of imagination, has said: “There’s a delight I have in making language around the things that often bring us discomfort. Discomfort is not something that is a deterrent for me. If anything, the things that make me the most uncomfortable is where the art-making for me begins. I also think about how the grotesque, at least in the context of this book, is a measure of survival” (Summer Farah, Electric Lit interview).

There is so much to explore in this powerful collection—Bloodmercy. The word “mercy” means “divine gift,” implying that mercy is something only God can give. Blood means kinship, connection, a bond. Jones’s childhood self moves through these poems into womanhood in the persona of Cain. Her self-mythmaking is her way of rewriting her own history. Jones has also revealed that when she wrote this book, she imagined herself as Cain—mirroring the time of her own coming of age and emergence into womanhood. To the poet, “blood” represents a bond, familial connections, and trust, despite the dysfunction of her childhood. By examining the concepts of blood and mercy, these poems explore the meaning of violence, desire, queerness, faith, power, and control, alongside the human need for mercy and forgiveness.

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College, she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar in Nonfiction. Her new poetry collection is OXYGEN II (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2025).

Hauntings
Vernon Lee, in conversation with Gretchen Felker-Martin and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Smith & Taylor Classics, 2025, 198 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Rivaa Ubrani

Vernon Lee’s Hauntings is a lusciously gothic quintet of stories whose intricate Italian settings echo with the ghosts and goddesses of half-remembered girls and women. Writing behind the pseudonym “Vernon Lee,” Violet Paget was one of the forerunners of supernatural fiction whose various stories were serialized in British literary journals during the late 1800s.

Despite writing amidst the general late Victorian craze for ghost stories, Lee distinguished her tales with their embodied settings, at once intimate and alienating to readers. Drawing from her own rich history of travelling, Lee’s nomadic characters radiate an “in-betweenness”; they neither fit into Lee’s Italy as locals nor into Lee’s world as persons, tending as they do to flicker between the real and the spectral realms of being.

Lee’s tales, with their ambiguous endings and psychological half-thrills, are in a sense deeply queer stories. Lee herself was both a staunch feminist and a pacifist who used her pseudonym proudly in both her private and public life and was known to dress in “mannish” attire. This, coupled with her refusal to abide by the heteronormative marital norms of the late Victorian period and her intense friendships with women, has led critics to read Lee as a queer woman.

Though confirming such a claim is elusive and perhaps historically invasive, lesbian experiences nevertheless color the pages of Hauntings. Morally gray women and feminine men take the starring role in all Lee’s stories, blurring the lines between guardian angels and succubi. They play witches, murderesses, and phantasmic Italian noblewomen who both bless and curse the tales’ protagonists with equal vigor.

What truly haunts Lee’s characters, though, is the power of art. Whether in sculpture, as song, or as a carefully-crafted portrait, the artistic looms over Lee’s Hauntings as a wraith-like presence—an unattainable ideal at once hankered-for and horrifying. Her collection thus operates in line with one of poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s most notable quotes: “For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure, / and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains / to destroy us” (“The First Elegy”).

The most moving of Lee’s tales is her opening story, “Amor Dure.” A short story conveyed in epistles that frames the slow coming-of-age of a sea witch from an uncannily detached perspective, this tale combines mythic tropes and Mediterranean imagery to bolster the emotional impact of its slowly unravelling yarn. Cursed to bring every soul she encounters to romantic ruin, this sea witch inverts the norms of the seaside Italian coast she washes onto, effectively annihilating them with her beauty.

I invite everyone to be annihilated by this and the rest of Lee’s uncannily gorgeous meditations on the artistic process as soon as you can.

Rivaa Ubrani (she/her) is an Indian poet, editor, and aspiring children’s book author, based in London, where she is pursuing an MA in Shakespeare Studies and interning at Sinister Wisdom. Her work often traces the intersections of mental illness, myth, and the hyperreal.

The Soulmate Strategy: My Imperfect Plan to Conquer Heartbreak and Find True Love
Corey Seemiller
She Writes Press, 2026, 392 pages
$17.99

Reviewed by Kara Zajac

This story is exactly why I love memoirs. You experience someone’s real journey right along with them: the raw, relatable vulnerability of heartbreak and recovery. It’s a story so personal that by the end, you feel like one of Corey’s friends. The Soulmate Strategy is a hilariously funny tale, yet it’s painful to read at times because you just want to wrap her in a bear hug and tell her: it’s going to be okay. Keep going! Corey captures the magic of memoir in this heartfelt quest to find the one. As a scientific person myself, I completely related to her equation-based approach to healing and love: make a step-by-step recovery list, meticulously complete each task, and poof. The result should be the perfect happily-ever-after, right? If only life and love were that easy.

Corey has been successful in her life. She has a great career that she’s truly passionate about, is raising a healthy-minded, well-rounded child, and has friends, but there’s one thing that’s missing: a soulmate. After watching her parents stay in a difficult, mismatched marriage for too long, she vowed early on never to repeat their mistakes. What she has learned through observation is that love eventually leaves, as with her dad when he packed his bags and went away, and two failed long-term relationships that ended in breakup.

Determined to fix the problem by strategically getting over heartbreak, she tries to hurry through the suffering and find true happiness by joining meetup groups, working out her angst through strenuous hikes, creating mantras, going to therapy, and having several close friends to bounce ideas off of. She writes her step-by-step catalog into what she calls “The Plan.” When The Plan doesn’t create her desired outcome within the specific timeline she envisions, Corey goes to greater lengths, getting advice from several different psychics, practicing the law of attraction, adding Reiki and crystal therapy to her routine, doing online “practice” dating, and eventually finding a past-life regression therapist (which sounded so cool; I can’t wait to find someone near me who does this).

Once she has narrowed the search to two candidates, Corey continues to ruminate, overanalyzing her connection to each person, placing much emphasis on the psychic’s details and looking for universal signs instead of embracing her own feelings, hoping that her choice will be the right one. While everyone can learn from their past mistakes, we see Corey’s almost paralyzing fear of making the wrong decision, so much so that she keeps the psychic’s analysis from her two prospects, hoping that external signs will choose for her and guide her path correctly. However, Corey eventually realizes that not everything can be left up to fate. The confusion she felt from waiting for signs from the universe was, in due time, replaced by trust in herself. She says: “While I do still trust the universe, I learned the value of embracing my own free will and not overemphasizing the importance of spiritual messaging during vulnerable times in my life” (372).

At the end of the book, Corey reveals The Plan and analyzes the wins and/or failures of each step, which I thought captured the essence of her experience completely. As a writer with two degrees in science, I relate to her approach of creating a step-by-step plan to achieve the end result, which was funny, considering it was about finding your true love, but completely compatible with a science-based brain. It was a nice personalized detail to include; it almost made me want to print it out and tape it to my closet door. For example, she says:

I’ve never been one to keep a secret. So, holding on to the psychic prophecy not only weighed on my conscience but also put at risk two very important relationships in my life. I will forever be grateful to both of them for accepting my confession and choosing to continue our connections. The whole situation, though, prompted me to add “Be transparent” to The Plan so I would never find myself harboring another secret (373).

Another hilarious aspect I completely loved about this book: instead of using the characters’ names, she kept them anonymous by labeling them with details specific to each one. There’s the friend she met at a meetup pool party, Naked and Afraid; the social-media friend, TikTok; the online date with no in-person chemistry, East Coast; the date where they went shopping, Pants; and the hiking friend who loved bird watching, Birds. This was a very creative and comedic way to get around the stickiness of friends and loved ones being overwhelmed and concerned when included in your life’s story.

By the end, Corey realizes that healing takes time and, sometimes, you just have to go with the flow and let life unfold on its own. This book is for anyone who has struggled with perfectionism, and offers the reader a chance to learn through someone else’s struggle to heal and move past their childhood trauma, finding love tightly packaged with endearment, laughter, and sensitivity. I feel anyone can learn about themselves by reading and understanding someone else’s struggles. The story is also a reminder that we all have similar struggles, and no one goes through life alone. If you’d like to follow Corey, you can find her inspirational stories on TikTok (@coreyseemiller) and Instagram (@lesbianlovelessons.corey), where she interviews lesbian-identified people who share a lesson they have learned about love.

Kara Zajac is a freelance writer, chiropractor, mother, wife, entrepreneur, and musician. Her debut, The Significance of Curly Hair: A Loving Memoir of Life and Loss, won the 2025 IPPY Silver Medal for Inspirational Nonfiction and was chosen for “The Best Books We Read in 2024” by the Independent Book Review. Its follow-up, The Special Recipe for Making Babies, was a finalist in 2022’s Charlotte Lit/ Lit South Awards for Nonfiction. Kara’s work has been published in Bay Area Reporter, Lesbian.com, Voraka Magazine, Story Circle Anthology, Imperfect Life Magazine, Ripped Jeans and Bifocals, and Just BE Parenting. Kara keeps people laughing with her blog www.KaraZajac.com and is happy to speak at book clubs and grief-support groups. She resides in North Georgia with her wife, Kim, and daughter, Senia Mae.

Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems
Robin Becker
University of New Mexico Press, 2026, 162 pages
$21.95

Reviewed by Ellen Miller-Mack

It’s April 17, 1977. The feminist poetry press Alice James Books is four years old. In the previous year, Robin Becker’s first collection of poems was published alongside Helena Minton and Marilyn Zuckerman in Personal Effects. All three come to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for a reading; they were invited by Spectrum, the campus literary journal. As I listen to Robin read “A Woman Leaving a Woman” I feel my young life change indelibly.

Poetry changes us. It’s been altering internal landscapes of humankind with powerful revelations for thousands of years. Lyric narrative poems illuminate paths forward through a broad range of feelings. Becker’s Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems, traverses fifty years of feminist observation, depth, humor, and a very particular bold voice. As an out lesbian since the 1970s, she has inspired generations of queer women with her exploration of relationships that are unique to us, as well as Jewish identity. Becker’s work also has a universal quality, with themes ranging from family dynamics to loss.

In Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems, Stephanie Burt writes, “Lyric poems show you yourself and somebody else; they show you what you have in common, not with everybody, but with somebody else, which means they can be mirrors and also windows.” With this quote in mind, I sit with all of Becker’s books stacked in front of me, breathing them in. Becker’s poems are both mirrors and windows. There is a translucency and clarity to her work. Her poems can take you by surprise as they skillfully guide you towards a moment that leaps into your own inner life. There’s a wide range of subjects in this expansive collection: well-crafted poetic responses to shifts in the poet’s internal landscape through connections with memory, people, and animals in her life. Sometimes a sketch. Sometimes a painting. Sometimes unexpected. Becker’s poems move with a smooth glide. It can feel somewhat restrained, with perspective from a slight distance, void of palpable vulnerability like other poets. Perhaps it’s a result of her awareness of the cultural significance of her work.

I like to imagine Robin Becker working a poem like a chunk of clay. The clay is the idea, and the lines are the myriad shapes she makes with it. She consistently demonstrates intellectual prowess as well as playfulness with language. She can pluck an idea from thin air, and put it to work. When she juxtaposes ideas or feelings, she provides tension, friction and a bit of distance. The poem “Semblance” begins, “The dog I love is turning into my father” and though some may experience this line with a wave of affection for both, that is not where the poem goes. It is explicitly about her old dog’s behavior—he can’t help it, he’s gotten a bit ornery—and implicitly about her father who “never had much use for my conversation // and showed his teeth when I / displeased him / collared as he was / and made to heel by his betters” revealing trauma endured by both her rescue dog and her father. The poem is written in tercets with run-on sentences and no punctuation, and I can’t think of another Becker poem utilizing this form. As is typical of her poems, there is no neat resolution, and the ending is startling.

There are new poems in Midsummer Count, followed by a journey through Becker’s distinguished career, with poems from all eight of Becker’s collections. Among the new poems, “You Have to Stay Ahead” is about pain with an expertly sustained train metaphor. Here are the first eight lines:

of the pain, she said, it’s a high speed
train gaining momentum,
headed for the town with your name.
You have to stay calm, seated, sedated
as the locomotive nears, curves
into view, freighted with your fears
of complication, infection,
pain’s hue and viscosity.

“The Walking Cure” contains various numbers documenting time, distance, and other measures, as if they could somehow contain the grief of losing a sister.

On June 24, 1986, she walked twenty-three
and-a-half miles, noting, “Hot. 97 degrees.”
On July 5, twenty miles in the rain.

In “Rescue Parable” we witness a rescue dog who “digs with his forepaws a grave, // and with his nose, dutiful as one enslaved, / covers with dirt the coming poverty.” Becker writes frequently about dogs and other animals. The subject in this poem is deep, persistent trauma and how nearly impossible it is to overcome: a wrenching situation for all of us mammals.

“Raccoon” presents the creature who is “Comedian of the hard frost, / deft champion of screw-on tops” now dead in the middle of the road and somehow lovingly paired with her zayde, her grandpa. Becker makes these kinds of connections work.

In “The Fix” she explores her friend Harvey’s approach to repair, creatively using whatever materials and tools we have in the moment, with a splash of magical thinking:

Harvey says it will hold for now meaning the gasket
he’s rigged to stop the leak in the water tank

And here, exquisite tenderness, in the love poem “The Subject of our Lives.” It ends with:

. . . Trust me, you say, and I am struck by the force
of your voice, the imperative form of any verb spoken in bed. Come home.
No, stay where you are. Longing will serve us while snow thickens
the sidewalks, delays the subways, tightens every street in town.

Becker’s playful side appears from time to time. In “UPS,” one of the new poems, she fantasizes about a “short marriage,” because for her, it’s too late for a long one:

UPS driver in brown shorts
with a pencil parked behind her ear.
I know she likes me by the way
she takes a granola bar from my hand,
shouting “hey, thanks”, as she runs
to the brown box of her truck.
I think she’d like to have coffee, talk
about her childhood, her favorite books
and movies, her vacation in P-town.

“Men as Friends” with an amusing first line, “I have a few which is news to me,” concludes with a gift from James the retired Marine who leaves two rainbow trout in her refrigerator, a nod to Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.”

Robin Becker has been serving poetry superbly for decades. Becker’s poems are carefully constructed with inner logic, but they are not cold. As through an open window, her figurative language continues to invite us in. She illuminates the small truths of our lives with clarity. For those who identify as feminist, lesbian, or Jew, Becker’s poetry is both validation and celebration.

Ellen Miller-Mack is a nurse practitioner (retired/rewired) with an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Her first book, When I Was a Grateful Mammal, won the 2025 Sappho’s Prize in Poetry from Headmistress Press. Her book reviews have appeared in Rattle, Valparaiso, Bookslut, The Rumpus, The Poetry Café, and Poetry Foundation. Ellen co-wrote The Real Cost of Prisons Comix (PM Press). She is the host of Poet Talk, a live radio program on WMUA. It is also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Crying in LA: Sapphic Longing in Tongues and Tears
Jasmin Benward
Tehom Center Publishing, 2025, 158 pages
$23.05

Reviewed by Nino Arobelidze

Jasmin Benward’s Crying in LA: Sapphic Longing in Tongues and Tears refuses to separate desire from dignity. Structured through an emotional forecast of “Sunny Skies,” “Partly Cloudy,” “Chance of Rain,” and “Showers,” the collection traces the intimate weather of longing with intention. Early poems dwell in flirtation and sensory closeness, while later pieces move toward rupture, grief, and a hard-won clarity shaped by loss. The sequencing feels deliberate. The poems read less like a loose gathering and more like a carefully arranged album, complete with refrains, tonal shifts, and thematic reprises.

The voice is direct, musical, and scene-driven. Early poems linger in everyday tenderness, where coffee, food, sound, clothing, and shared ritual become portals into intimacy. “Over Coffee” and “Come Close” situate affection within cultural specificity and shared presence. Affection unfolds through repetition and shared ritual, allowing intimacy to take shape through presence rather than declaration, as in the line “When you come close / You feel like a Sunday” (19). Elsewhere, Benward’s lines move with the confidence of spoken word while retaining visual texture and lyric punch. The result is work that feels both conversational and immersive.

Intimacy is positioned as something sacred rather than performed for an external gaze. The erotic poems move with unapologetic agency, framing desire not as spectacle or confession but as connection and choice. In poems such as “Sex Magic” and “Sub,” desire is rendered as lived, embodied experience rather than abstraction, where sexuality becomes a site of imagination and devotion, as in the line “I hear the grind of your chains drip from your body” (60). Intimacy remains deliberate and embodied, grounded in the speaker’s control of voice and perspective.

Throughout the collection, desire is situated within explicitly Black cultural and political realities. Poems such as “Passport” and “Selfish Black Futurism” expand the scope of longing beyond romance. The speaker names censorship, land, diaspora, disability, autonomy, and surveillance as lived contexts that have shaped her sense of intimacy and visibility. These forces appear not as distant ideas, but as conditions the speaker moves through. Yet love is never abstract. It unfolds inside systems that shape who is seen, protected, or erased. “In this world I am chosen / Other people’s opinions don’t exist” (107). By anchoring intimacy within these realities, the collection insists on specificity over universality.

As the emotional arc shifts into “Chance of Rain” and “Showers,” the poems turn toward heartbreak and self-interrogation. Modern forms of absence appear through social media monitoring, quiet surveillance, and the contradictions of no contact, where the speaker watches, checks, and registers presence without response. As “Banned” captures, “I know I occupy stolen lands / why don’t you? / I’m governed by sacred law / I have a voice, and / I have choices” (149). Benward renders longing through these small, contemporary rituals of looking and waiting.

By the time the collection arrives at the title poem, the focus broadens to vocation and inevitability. The speaker affirms her identity as storyteller, musician, and witness, declaring, “I praise the moment that / Happy tears, are / What have me crying in LA” (p. 156). Longing has not defeated her. It has shaped her language. In Crying in LA, tears are not only about heartbreak; they register ambition, authorship, and the persistent belief that one’s voice is meant to take up space.

Crying in LA offers a portrait of Black sapphic longing that is sensual, funny, political, wounded, and luminous. It honors pleasure without trivializing it and documents heartbreak without romanticizing it. Benward’s collection reminds readers that to desire deeply is also to risk deeply, and that telling the truth about that risk is its own form of power.

Nino Arobelidze is a writer, vocalist, producer, and mixer working across music, film, and narrative forms. Her work explores longing, identity, and emotional architecture through sound and language. She creates under the moniker Girl Named Nino.