Hungerstone
Kat Dunn
Zando, 2025, 336 pages
$28.00

Reviewed by Sydney Minor

“What is a monster but a creature of agency?” (237). This is the central question posed by Kat Dunn’s Hungerstone. A retelling of the 1872 lesbian vampire novella Carmilla, Dunn’s novel takes the gothic and sapphic essence of the original and expands it into a fully-fledged, well-rounded work that draws the reader in with its elegant prose and brooding atmosphere.

The novel follows Lenore, an aristocratic woman burdened by past tragedy and discontent in her present life and marriage. When she travels north, to Sheffield, to prepare her husband’s manor for a hunting party, she encounters a mysterious woman named Carmilla, who has suffered a carriage accident. As their relationship deepens, Carmilla challenges Lenore to confront what she truly desires—and demands that she pursue it. The further Lenore falls under Carmilla’s spell, the more the border between agency and monstrosity blurs, leaving the reader to ponder what is right and wrong in the case of revenge, liberation, and forbidden love.

Dunn skillfully explores the dichotomy between fear and desire, using the constrained agency of Victorian women as a lens through which to examine sapphic longing. Lenore’s character wants more in life; she wants to have more power than presiding over houses, staff, and guests, but she also feels a longing that is deeper, more personal, and more taboo. The novel includes questions of repression, identity, and whether reclaiming control over one’s life—especially as a woman in a patriarchal world—can ever be free from violence.

At times, the novel suffers from over-explanation, particularly concerning Lenore’s backstory and how it informs her current behavior. The occasional flashbacks often feel out of place, not adding much to the story and occasionally interrupting the narrative momentum. Additionally, the supporting characters can feel one-dimensional, serving more as props than participants. However, this also allows Carmilla’s seductive and enigmatic presence to stand out as a true highlight, drawing the reader in just as she draws Lenore in.

Rich in atmosphere and emotional complexity, the novel oozes with darkness, longing, and seduction, making Hungerstone a worthy and haunting successor to the Carmilla story.

Sydney Minor (she/her) is a New York-born, London-based writer and musician interning with Sinister Wisdom. She recently completed her undergraduate studies at the Royal College of Music and will begin a master’s in musicology at Cambridge University this autumn, with a focus on the intersection of queer studies and twentieth-century opera.

Queer Communion: Religion in Appalachia
Edited by Davis Shoulders
University Press of Kentucky, 2025, 168 pages
$19.95

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him” (James Baldwin, 1962).

From the start, this collection makes clear a shared experience of being harmed by the people we love the most, in the name of God and love, and the complications that arise when you continue to love the people who seem to swing between loving you and hating you. Each work in the compilation wrestles with what it means to have faith, both in God and the people around us, beginning with, “effectively all rural queer Appalachians and Southerners have loved people who hated them—or at least parts of them, parts that can’t be divided out” (x). While Queer Communion leans more into a positive connection with faith, it doesn’t shy away from harm either; it just shows ways in which people have re-shaped or found a different way of worship, which I appreciated.

The collection reiterates the idea of making one’s religion in nearly every segment, piecing together queerness with Appalachian identity, religious views (from Catholicism to strict protestant evangelicalism), and how this “holiness” exists apart from exclusionary beliefs. Davis Shoulders writes, “I attend a church of my own making. At any place where a sense of knowing is felt” (128). And Jarred Johnson says, “Faith seems like it should be life-transforming, not a set of strictures by which to abide” (118). Savannah Sipple defines love and holiness well, writing:

There are moments in our lives when we know we’re confident in the person we are, in the things we know to be true about ourselves. . . What would my grandmother say about this granddaughter of hers who now has a wife, who now has a love whose arms open wide enough to call me home? I’d like to think she’d call that holy (13).

I agree that faith is about finding a place of honesty, where one can be fully themselves. Julie Rae Powers calls queerness “spiritual in its own right” (21). The theme of queer acceptance is constant in the collection; for example, John Golden’s piece begins by discussing baptism as a moment of queer acceptance, which I appreciated for its beautiful symbolism.

Golden’s work took an interesting turn, though, when they told a story about arguing with a right-wing man, and in a moment of anger, told him he’s removed from the grace of God. Later, they expressed regret, and I was a bit conflicted. Hateful people tell queer folks all the time that God condemns them. Why should this hateful guy get mercy? I suppose it’s complicated. Golden’s piece forces you to sit with the question of whether anyone gets to say who’s beyond redemption.

Conflict is part of what makes the collection so wonderful, though, because it’s honest and, in many cases, doesn’t tie everything up neatly. It recognises the pain of religion, deep and complicated that it is. Some of the essays lean into faith and find peace in it, while others walk away from it entirely. The collection makes space for both. Mack Rogers’ piece offers insight into how a faith that emphasises control and worship, conditional love, and operates as a tool for manipulation can impact us. Then, it compares this religious control with defining one’s own joy. Emma Cieslik sums up the conflict well, writing, “many queer people like myself feel the same urgency of ‘choice’ or being pushed to ‘decide’ between living as their authentic selves and drinking the Kool-Aid of the church” (45).

I finished the work with the takeaway that each author had built something sacred for themselves, even in spaces where they were told they didn’t belong. Shoulders describes the struggle of situating Appalachian identity given others’ exclusionary beliefs, saying, “They’ve imagined it to be a place where a person like me shouldn’t belong” (132). And yet every author has dispelled aspects of those imaginings. Appalachia is and always has been a space where everyone belongs; the people who hate don’t get to define God, the land, and who is welcome, no matter how hard they might try.

Allison Quinlan is a nonprofit manager in Scotland, originally from the rural southern United States.

Sunburn
Chloe Michelle Howarth
Verve Books, 2023, 288 pages
$16.99

Reviewed by Jules Gellert

Sunburn is a coming-of-age story set in 1990s rural Ireland, following Lucy as she faces her love for her friend Susannah over the course of several years. The catalyst of her infatuation is spending time with Susannah the summer before their final year of school, a summer spent sunbathing in the yard of Susannah’s absent parents’ home. By the end of the summer, the two girls are unable to deny their interest in each other. They begin a secret relationship that slowly deteriorates as they prepare for the rest of their lives.

When Lucy’s mother catches the girls together, Lucy begins to publicly date her best friend, Martin, to prove to her mother that she is “moving in the right direction” (229). Lucy finds herself forced down the same pipeline her mother and every other woman she knows has gone through. She must choose whether to follow the well-trodden path of domesticity in order to preserve the conditional love of her mother, friends, and community, or to follow her love for Susannah.

While Sunburn covers topics perhaps overdone within the queer coming-of-age genre, such as the role of religion and guilt in self-acceptance, Howarth dives much deeper both through her excellent writing and her discussion of the impact of shame on those outside the individual experiencing it. In making her choices between Susannah and Martin, or her own happiness and the path set before her, Lucy wounds everyone around her. She tries to walk a tightrope between these options, but by trying to make everyone happy and avoid pain and rejection, she becomes selfish. Howarth explores these ideas through a perfect combination of tender, intense, and occasionally unsettling inner dialogue. Lucy’s love for Susannah is not sappy, but all-consuming and incredibly honest. For some readers, this may be a bit off-putting—but for many, it will make the story more sincere and profound.

Lucy’s story requires patience, like that which a good friend offers. Following her story is painful and frustrating, but also deeply moving. As a reader, you might struggle with the characters in their questions such as: what is love worth and worth losing? Sunburn is a distinctive story about choices, shame, and love, perhaps best summarized by Susannah in a letter to Lucy: “I’ll marry you if you get past all the shame of being with me” (98). Despite the young age of its characters, this book is mature and good for anyone who wants to experience the overwhelming intensity and honesty of a first love.

Jules Gellert is a master’s student in Helsinki and is a Sinister Wisdom intern for the summer of 2025. She spends her time reading, studying, and making art.

Be Gay, Do Crime
Edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley
Dzanc Books, 2025, 203 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Ash Lev

Be Gay, Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Queer Chaos is the second anthology by editors Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley, a follow-up to Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women. The sixteen queer-authored short stories of Be Gay, Do Crime are less concerned with getting bogged down in the details of the law and more interested in exploring the catharsis, necessity, and queerness of rule-breaking. As someone who’s not a big reader of typical crime or heist novels, this struck the perfect balance for me. From stealing dogs and drugs to shooting politicians, every morally objectionable act performed by these characters offers an unexpected thrill, echoing the sentiment of the John Waters quote in the book’s early pages, “You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book” (v).

I was hooked from the title alone, immediately recognizing the phrase from its frequent use in online queer circles. The sentiment is an important reminder, especially at a point in time when queer and trans existence is increasingly criminalized, that the law was not made with our safety or wellbeing in mind. With its equally delightful title and cover, Be Gay, Do Crime is a celebration of a new generation of queer anarchism. As Myriam Lacroix writes in the opening story, “The Meaning of Life,” “They loved breaking the rules in the name of their love, and they especially liked getting away with it” (7).

“It’s a Cruel World For Empaths Like Us” by Soula Emmanuel is told entirely in second-person perspective—almost as if to challenge John Waters’ earlier quote—and forces readers to walk a mile in the criminal protagonist’s pinching, too-tight shoes. The story opens with a jolt of pain as “you,” an unnamed trans woman, undergo a round of laser hair removal. The treatment intended to ease the distress of gender dysphoria only worsens it when it leaves behind a painfully obvious facial rash. When you are dismissed by a customer service representative after expressing concern about said rash, you decide to retaliate. Your weapon of choice? Hoax threats.

So near and so far, it is, so nothing and yet so everything, so diminutive and yet so responsible for a small but significant portion of your problems. You endeavor to deepen your voice, in the hope that it will give you a kind of ambient authority, although it’s been so long that you can barely do it without sounding like you are doing a bad impression of yourself. You find the phone number and you dial, careful first to turn off the caller ID.
But you don’t complain (26).

In another case of dysphoria-driven crime, Aurora Mattia’s “Wild and Blue” tells the story of Peach and Sandy, who are on the run with a stolen vial of Dysphorable™. This fictional hallucinogenic drug was manufactured by a private pharmaceutical company with the intent of mass market distribution, but had not yet received FDA approval. Desperate, dysphoric, and drunk in love, the couple use the drug carelessly, and soon learn the consequences.

[Peach] was a woman. It was so simple. She was a woman because she was in love. It could be enough. One day it could be enough because she was a woman and it didn’t matter if Sandy was a man or a woman or some kind of secret thing. She was Sandy’s woman and it was enough (110).

Among its many strengths, Be Gay, Do Crime succeeds in portraying trans people not as sad, helpless victims, but as relatable, resourceful, rightfully angry, and ready to fight back.

Ash Lev is a butch writer and media artist currently living in Tkaronto. In Ash’s free time, you’ll find him kissing his cat’s head, overanalyzing TV shows, or contemplating grad school.

Daughters of Chaos
Jen Fawkes
The Overlook Press, 2024, 288 pages
$27.00

Reviewed by Martha Miller

Jen Fawkes is an award-winning author with a literary style that is at times lavish and stunning. I particularly enjoyed her periodic aphorisms reminiscent of Oscar Wilde.

For the most part, Daughters of Chaos is an epistolary novel told from multiple first-person perspectives of a set of twins, Silas and Sylvie. The narratives include their childhood and letters from their teen years onward. A major part of the story is about the Civil War, during 1862, and looking back on the events from 1877. The book is multilayered, while the story is advanced in sequence from the beginning to the end of Sylvie’s life. Historical figures are interspersed with fiction. The tale is more than simply a story of letters—it also includes encyclopedia entries, a translated play, news articles, and more. It synthesizes history, myth, and sheer invention, incorporating stories along with periodic jumps into ancient Greek drama. For me, these additional layers made the novel harder to follow. Nonetheless, the writing is engaging and well-crafted.

The story starts with the twins’ pregnant, unwed mother, Brigitte, and their tinkering, unavailable father. As children, they are abandoned by their mother and older sister and left alone with their father. While we see them from childhood, the lion’s share of the book takes place in Silas’ and Sylvie’s young adulthood. After the father’s death, Silvie’s brother leaves her, and we hear from him in letters which contain stories of his Confederate adventures in submarine construction and maintenance. Close to adulthood, Sylvie runs away to Nashville in search of her sister, Marina. There, she joins a Ladies Aid Society, a Union spy’s secret society of magical women disguised as prostitutes, secretly supporting the Union cause. These public women are all part of an ancient cult dedicated to trouble-making and the worship of Chaos. They work together toward a golden era of female sovereignty. Sylvie is tasked with translating the final, lost comedy of Aristophanes, and with the help of a dozen Priestesses of Chaos, works on it daily from the time she arrives in Nashville.

In an especially interesting section, we are told that real prostitutes nearly defeated the Union army due to syphilis. The authorities in Nashville recognize this prostitution problem and decide to round up all of these women and ship them elsewhere to rid Nashville of the disease. The prostitutes are put on a ship, and in a long, grueling trip, go from one port to the next, rejected each time until, unbathed, dehydrated, hungry, and some dead from suicide, they return to Nashville, where new laws are made to make prostitution legal. Working women are licensed and must have physicals that render them clean of disease. Early on, Sylvie tells us, “The fact that you’ve never seen something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” This sets up the reader for the speculative nature of the novel. Incredibly, we encounter a creature like Ray Bradbury’s Fog Horn, with silver scales, who is Silvie’s long-lost sister.

My problem with this novel is the scattershot structure. I wish I could tell you the whole thing comes together like a puzzle, but if so, I didn’t see it. The novel weaves together Greek mythology, Civil War history, sisterhood, fire, sex, and love. There are layers of text, journal entries, letters, narratives, play performances, as well as side stories told by other women. One in particular that will stick in my mind is about a woman who wants to murder her daughter because, despite appearances, she believes the girl isn’t hers. The father stops his wife several times and finally kills her. Then, because he loves her and couldn’t live without her, he kills himself. However, these bits and pieces take the reader in and out of the narrative.

While some lesbian attraction develops, only at the end does it come to fruition. The bewitching Hannah and Sylvie eventually ride off together toward California, into the sunset, one might say, where Sylvie gives birth to twins. Silvie puts the scraps of her life together in a book, and she also, like her sister, becomes a leviathan. In the end, we find Sylvie ready to teach her daughters how to belong to themselves.

Martha Miller is a retired English professor and a Midwestern writer whose books include fiction, creative nonfiction, anthologies, and mysteries. Her nine books were published by traditional, but small, women’s presses. She’s published several reviews, articles, and short stories and won several academic and literary awards. For more detailed information, her website is https://www.marthamiller.net/. Her Wikipedia page is here. She lives in ‘The Land of Lincoln’ with her wife, two unruly dogs, and two spoiled and sleepy cats.

Letters to Forget: Poems
Kelly Caldwell
Knopf, 2024, 112 pages
$24.00

Reviewed by Lya Hennel

I previously reviewed Your Dazzling Death by Cass Donish, a beautiful poetry collection and elegy to the author’s partner, Kelly Caldwell. Also a poet, Kelly was a trans writer and visual artist living with bipolar. This review is of her debut poetry collection, published after her death. A lot of these poems are addressed to Cass as letters. Letters to Forget is a companion book to Your Dazzling Death. The two works can be read separately and are both incredible on their own. But they complete and answer one another painfully, yet beautifully.

The collection is divided into three parts: Firstly, “Promise Light or Tomorrow” opens with apocalypse—an ending as a beginning. Half of the collection is composed of poems titled “[house of]” where “house” might be the body along with the grief. The other half is addressed to Kelly’s partner, Cass, and the poems are all titled “[dear c.” In these titles, the bracket never closes, as if every letter meant for Cass is endless and beyond rules: “[dear c. Please, don’t mind me, I’m standing facing the wall, trying to pay off a debt’’ (24). Kelly conveys her struggles with mental illness: the depressive episodes, the high-intensity emotions, and the empty, heavy hopelessness. “[dear c. Will you kindly care for my garden / until I return? It is spring now. […] I will return” (38) reads like an omen, a request, and a promise at once.

The second part of the collection, “Self-Portrait as Job,” mainly consists of a long-form poem. Across fourteen pages, exquisitely written, the poem features the biblical figure Job, who might be read as similar to Kelly trying to fit in a place she couldn’t find, in a life that felt like a stage play—suffocating and already scripted: “There was a man / Whose name was Job / Who couldn’t uncouple His good fortune / From his guilt” (42). “What you think is a hot plate coil heating red in your mouth / Is the taste of shame / Spit or swallow it / Either way it may take quiet root” (44). Throughout this chapter are feelings of shame, guilt, alienation, and boredom, intertwined with religious themes and seemingly religious trauma. Then, the words repeat like a metronome, in an intoxicating cadence: “It is summer, so there is no rain. The house […] It is half, so there is no whole. The house […] Is never still, is still, is no longer. The house” (45). As one body stumbles out of another / Impersonates a house / In passing” (52). “All of this is about god talk” (57) ends the masterful poem, followed by a poem titled “GOD TALKS.”

Finally, in the third part of the chapter, “Unlearning the Letter,” we return to short-form poems and the lulled repetitions of “[dear c.” and “[house of].” One of my favourite “[dear c.” poems reads: “To cross out is to add. I worry I might become unreal” (79). In this line, crossing out or leaving is a way of adding another chapter to the story, and a way in which the narrator makes a choice rather than following a written script. The poem also includes: “resurrection is a sense of direction […] I never wanted to be a wanderer, […] I plan to suffer greatly at my auctioned introduction into hope. This talent for getting lost requires effort’’ (89).

In many poems, Kelly reminds us of the various shapes death can take. Faced with the unknown, impermanence, and endless possibilities we die, transform, transcend, and experience rebirth, in an infinite cycle. For now, I am here, and if only for a brief moment, it might be enough. Just as when I read Cass Donish’s Your Dazzling Death, I found myself reading each poem again and finding new layers and meaning each time. I will keep coming back to Letters to Forget, as Kelly’s painfully accurate and relatable words convey and provoke intense feelings. This work is a strikingly beautiful collection that I know I will remember.

Lya Hennel (they iel) is a former Sinister Wisdom intern from France based in London, UK. They are passionate about queer multidisciplinary art and literature, poetry, and translating.

Mouth: Stories
Puloma Ghosh
Astra House, 2024, 224 pages
$26.00

Reviewed by Margaret Zanmiller

Puloma Ghosh’s stories in Mouth are made to read in one sitting, preferably starting at dusk with a storm rolling in, so that you can fall deep into the haunted world Ghosh weaves. The short stories establish themes of carnal desire and passionate death. Readers are reminded of the shadow selves that follow all of us. Using powerful language, Ghosh feeds a world of destruction that leaves space for intimacy and closeness.

Mouth’s narrators honor the banal things that happen every day with incredibly detailed observations that effectively place the reader in the fictional world: the party on the porch that’s separate from the party inside, the way cold feels against our skin, a lover leaving quietly, without a fight. In many of Ghosh’s stories, we are let into inner worlds that are expressed outwardly without shame, and always with pain, curiosity, and desire. Pages are lined with fresh monsters the narrators want to join, be held by, and become. Readers are provided a healthy dose of intensely descriptive body horror.

Ghosh writes for bisexuals preoccupied with death, former or current emo kids, fans of the TV show Yellowjackets, the movie Bones and All, or the band My Chemical Romance. Ghosh writes for those whose loneliness has chewed on them, eaten them, and spit them back out. Stick with the collection; Ghosh’s stories grow stronger with each page turn. Soon enough, they are smoking on the edge of your bed, eating raw meat from your fridge, looking at you through the mirror, and asking you to walk into a black hole with them.

Margaret Zanmiller is a Saint Paul dyke with a BA in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies from the University of Minnesota.

A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories
Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell
Hogarth, 2024, 272 pages
$28.00

Reviewed by Ruby Stefanucci

Mariana Enríquez, renowned for her 2021 International Booker Prize shortlisted work The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, haunts readers once more in her collection A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories. The twelve short stories, primarily set in Argentina, follow the horrors and lives of predominantly women narrators. Echoing themes of her previous work, Enríquez revisits sexism, illness, class inequality, gentrification, and mental and physical ruin throughout the text in a post-pandemic setting. A Sunny Place for Shady People is built on the language of mythology, as myth is explained and entangled in her stories.

In the collection, Enríquez tears womanhood apart; she inspects the ugly insides and confronts us with the pieces of what’s left. Her elements of horror are drawn from the dark and undesirable intricacies of humanity and femininity—the parts of ourselves we hide and shy away from. Her depictions of abandonment, absence, and women in isolation swiftly manifest into horror. She portrays scenes of disbelief, in which a woman’s intuition is diminished, and scenes of transformation, as when women are metamorphosed against their will in “Night Birds” or mutilate themselves for freedom in “Metamorphosis.” Enríquez explores women’s consciousness and experiences, as we witness them grapple with understanding themselves and the horrors to which they succumb.

Enríquez’s narrators are not perfect victims nor martyrs. Her characters live in worlds on the brink of collapse, built on colonialism, sexism, and paranoia. The beauty of Enríquez’s text lies in the unravelling of these forces and the authentic imperfections of her characters.

A Sunny Place for Shady People provokes visceral reactions through the stories’ building tension and direct, striking imagery. Her story “Refrigerator Cemetery” (one of her less grotesque works) exhibits horror in the images of countless abandoned refrigerators and naïve protagonists.

Enríquez’s final, most insidious story closes the collection cyclically, as “Black Eyes” showcases a rejection of the supernatural, as opposed to its invitation in the first story, “My Sad Dead.” Enríquez prompts readers to question how horror might dominate our lives if we let it in.

Ruby Stefanucci (she/her) is currently based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, Australia. She recently completed her undergraduate study double majoring in English and Classics, and was a fall 2024 intern with Sinister Wisdom. Ruby is a lover, writer, artist, and poet, but mainly just a girl in the world.

Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down?
Allison Blevins
Persea Books, 2024, 70 pages
$17.00

Reviewed by Pelaya Arapakis

Allison Blevins’s award-winning book Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? is a lyrical meditation on the effects of chronic illness, disability, and a spouse’s gender transition as experienced through the prism of a marriage. Following the daily lives of its central characters—Grim and Sergeant—Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? contemplates what it means to exist in a body among other bodies. Blevins’s hybrid narrative-in-vignettes defies conformity to a single genre, pushing and pulling between fragmented prose-poetry, fairytale, and auto-fiction, guiding us through difficult and deeply layered emotional terrains that are profound and heart-wrenching.

Masks figure prominently in Blevins’s work as a device to explore the multiplicity of identity. This thematic concern is first implied in the very epigraph of the text: “Under this mask another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces” (Claude Cahun). Soon after, we are introduced to Grim and Sergeant—personae of Blevins and her partner, respectively—as they navigate the world in bodies and identities that are in various states of flux. However, change is often accompanied by grief, and we bear witness to Grim, who mourns for the person she once was, the person she was before her illness, before “every moment [was] an accounting of pain” (61). Throughout this process, it becomes clear that identity is neither static nor singular, that “Grim is a character played by the woman she once was” (38). Here, identity is itself a mask—but not necessarily one that, when removed, unveils a definitive truth, but is instead a perpetual unfurling.

Throughout the narrative, Grim’s body is often rendered as a site of pain. Daily tasks become gruelling, “Grim tells the doctor, I want to stand long enough to make grilled cheese, want to walk the dark living room at night to check the children are breathing” (18). Still, Blevins speaks to the grounding force of the body. While “Grim often finds herself lost. . . Her body remains,” with its needs, desires, its state of simply being, binding her—binding us— to others: “we are not held together but bound to each other” (10). Grim is reminded of this visceral nature of embodiment in a medical waiting room, of “how we all do this strange moving together as marionettes. Like smelling armpits or ear wax or maybe dead skin squeezed from a tight black pore. Like remembering the weight of a past lover on your body. Like breaking apart or sewing together” (7). Yet, sometimes our needs conflict with those of people around us, and it is this very tension that Blevins captures with incredible nuance and poignancy. In a quarrel with the Sergeant, Grim asks what he needs, to which he responds, “I need you to need less from me” (41). Just as pain might course through Grim’s body, the quiet fracture of this confession reverberates throughout these pages.

Swirling between genres, Blevins weaves a gripping portrait of a marriage that is as devastating as it is tender. As the title suggests, Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? reminds us that embodiment is shared, messy, and ineluctable, and that our bodies—with all the joys, aches, and complexities they bring—are our ultimate homes, even as they collapse around us.

Pelaya Arapakis (she/her) is a musician, arts worker, and freelance writer based in Naarm/Melbourne.

The Unboxing of a Black Girl
Angela Shanté
Page Street YA, 2024, 160 pages
$18.99

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

Angela Shanté’s new poetry collection is subtitled “A Love Letter to Black Girls.” In these powerful poems, she confronts “Black Girls vs. The World.” She writes: “I want to live in a world where Black girls get to be free” (9). In the poet’s introduction, she confesses that “Poetry and experimental storytelling have always anchored me when the rainbow truly wasn’t enough,” paraphrasing the title of by Ntozake Shange’s 1975 play, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Shanté claims that she wrote the book that she always wanted to read—a book to be read out loud—full of choreopoems vivid in their articulation and poetic outcry.

The poet evokes an American history that has always exploited and abused Black people. The salve poured into the wounds suffered by Black women is found in their respect for inheritance, tradition, and legacy. She credits her own admiration for the elders who molded and shaped her during her childhood years as key to her survival. Her relationship with her mother and with her older sister, who assumed the maternal role when their mother was missing, became vital to the “unboxing” of Angela Shanté.

The poet writes of the “boxes,” or labels, used to define and classify Black people, especially ingrained into the psychology of young Black girls. In her poem “Floss (Verb),” she introduces the verb “to floss,” which means “to flaunt” in her own language. Through this word, she describes the economic boundaries that existed between herself, her sister, and the other children in the neighborhood whom she was told to call “the poor”:

“Having luxuries placed you in a tier above. I knew that if I had something I could flaunt over another person, the world would treat me a little nicer. Hold me a little gentler. So, allowance was a big get. It meant my big sister and I were a pair of the very few girls in our hood who had money to spend. Having extra was a big floss” (18).

The poet reveals that “some boxes are chosen for us” with the defined, restrictive, and established roles Black girls are forced to play by their family members who instill in them certain codes of behavior and language. Other “boxes” become part of the wider, even more insidious influence of false socialization caused by racial differences, economic stratification, and prejudice.

As I reviewed this poetry collection, I was drawn to the philosophy of James Baldwin in Begin Again—Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.’s series of timely essays on the life and works of the novelist and social critic. I began to consider the process of “unboxing” the self that Shanté describes in her poems. There are obvious similarities between this process of “unboxing” and the personal transformation Baldwin experienced through his work. Professor Glaude writes:

“Imagine as a child grappling with the hurtful words that say you’re ugly, he (Baldwin) intimates to Fern Marja Eckman, his first biographer. ‘You take your estimate of yourself from what the world says about you. I was always told that I was ugly. My father told me that. And everybody else. But mostly my father. So I believed it. Naturally. Until today I believed it’” (35).

The mission of Shanté’s work is to lay claim to and reinforce the beauty found in the Black family, in the Black body and mind, and within the landscapes of the neighborhoods in which we dwell. She writes in the poem, “The South Bronx”: “between the grime and litter / over burned buildings / and through smoke-filled highways / i can make out beauty” (79). This exemplifies the recurring theme of her poems, that there is inherent beauty in the lives of Black people that cannot be stifled, maligned, nor ignored. She convinces readers that we all need to step out of our boxes.

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program at Goddard College, she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar. She has published three poetry collections as well as two chapbooks of poetry. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Atlanta Review, Callaloo, Calyx, Chiron Review, Seneca Review, Tuskegee Review, World Literature Today, and many other literary and scholarly journals.