I Hope This Helps
Samiya Bashir
Nightboat Books, 2025, 144 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

Seven years after Field Theories—Samiya Bashir’s third poetry collection which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award for Poetry—comes her recent work in I Hope This Helps. Bashir’s work, both individual and collective, has been published, printed, and performed across America and abroad. Samiya Bashir is a poet, librettist, performer, and multimedia artist. Her honors include a Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Regional Arts and Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, and two Michigan Hopwood Poetry Awards. She currently serves as the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University.

Bashir has edited magazines and anthologies of literature and visual arts. In 2002, she cofounded Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBTQ+ writers of African descent. Also, she served as an executive director of Lambda Literary from 2022 to 2023 where her mission was to elevate the work of LGBTQ+ writers, affirm the value of their stories, and advocate for queer and trans writers.

I Hope This Helps explores the metamorphosis of the artist despite the despair brought on by isolation and the limits of our social realities: time, money, work, and widespread global crises. Her poems raise the question: “What can it mean to thrive in the world as it is?” Both within and extending beyond traditional academic settings, Bashir’s work creates, employs, and teaches a restorative poetics, turning her moments of painful experience into triumphs of witness, healing, and change. Her meditation reveals her vulnerable inner life and how she has evolved into an artist.

Bashir knew at the age of eight that she wanted to become a writer. She taught herself how to read early and started keeping a journal. Both of her parents were public school teachers. She was encouraged by her grandfather’s nephew, who was a journalist, to begin writing. Other early influences on her work were hearing June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights” in 1991 and 1992, and the murder of Rodney King.

Subsequently, Bashir learned the importance of community among writers. She has said about the writer’s life: “If there's any utility to being a poet. . . it’s our job. To help people articulate what’s happening. And know they're not alone in the articulating of it.”

To Bashir, “The poem itself is something alive—not just existing on the page.” Bashir has invested time in the theater and her operas and installations have traveled throughout the country. “Awareness,” she says, “is the chief motivation to art. You can be distracted and miss it. We’re taught to be distracted.” We have been distracted from attention to the fates of certain populations. “When you’re talking to people of color you must have to acknowledge trauma.”

In I Hope This Helps, Bashir’s work benefits from her well-rounded artistic perspective. Her poems thrive in the form of typographies, cartographies, musical scores, and photographs (e.g. the poems “Negro Being” and “Freakish Beauty,” (102-103). Other poems in the collection draw on Bashir’s lifelong practice of journaling. The poem “Letter from Exile” highlights her sojourn in Rome after winning a coveted prize:

“I am still, in theory, one of two 2019-20 Rome Prize Fellows in Literature. The year marked the 125th anniversary of the American Academy in Rome: a rare two-poet year. Bold and brilliant Nicole Sealey holds the second prize.”

“We are, together, the Academy’s first Black women Literature Fellows. Ever. Being a Negro First™ just feels so last century” (50).

This prose poem startles the reader with its insistence that the poet’s stay in Rome under the auspices of the prize, during the pandemic, was a form of exile, an expatriate experience both physical and intellectual.

Of the Italian language she writes in the poem/journal:

“The Venetian etymology of ciao is one of enslavement. Whether coming or going one said schiavo: I am your slave. This was, I guess, in case someone forgot” (53).

And of her return to the States she writes:

“Most days America screams to anyone who’ll listen how it hates me so much it would rather kill us all than let me live” (55).

The poet Erica Hunt has written of this new collection: “What do we do to live and thrive—as Black people, joyous and queer, new neighbors and strangers, our full humanity—dwarfed in the shadows by towers of power, distraction, and fear? Bashir’s poetry leans into these questions using her superpower—pausing to listen—over-hearing and hearing over—‘hearing’ under and rewriting, reinscribing her Journey—through the ‘twinkle textured disco ball Jenga set’—and shows the reader how creative power fuels us to begin again. And again.”

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. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in many literary and scholarly journals.

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.

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.

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.

To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers
Edited by Rae Garringer
The University Press of Kentucky, 2025, 112 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Home is a complicated thing. For many queer folks from Appalachia, home is too often a place longed for, but which we know will never quite fully have us. This collection captures that tension well, and importantly amplifies the voices of Black, Indigenous, and other marginalised peoples in the collection of essays and poetry. Living in spaces that don’t always love you back means that too many queer people move through the world braced for violence.

The collection gets right into the gut punch of what survival looks like with “What You Should Know Before You Kill Me” by Brandon Sun Eagle Jent (2-3). Jent writes, “This body is but a wave in the ocean of me,” (2) an assertion that queer existence is something larger than the physical body, and not easily erased. Rayna Momen’s “They Say All Kinds Are Welcome Here” lays bare the reality for so many, particularly people of colour in these spaces: “yet these [country] roads to prosperity / are full of [shit] potholes and bigotry” (4). The collection definitely doesn’t ease you in—you understand the nuances of the author’s lived experience before you finish the first essay.

Lucien Darjeun Meadows continues the conversation, “And I can never ‘go home,’ not really, not completely, ever again” (12). So, the work presents a question to the reader: Where exactly do you go and what do you do when home is both a longing and a loss? What I left with is that it’s up to us to carve out a space and fight for a place to be. I understand that this should inspire in some ways, but reading this during the current political climate in the United States left me feeling a little disheartened at the reality that we’ll seemingly always have to fight just to be.

Every piece in the collection speaks to those questions of longing and belonging. hermelinda cortés writes about being Mexican-American in a space that doesn’t “claim” her and her choice to stay, rooted by something deeper than belonging in a traditional sense. Likewise, Momen’s “Growing up Black in Appalachia / made me want to fight and to flee / left me internalized and empowered / to live a double life / like Affrilachians learn to do” (26) echoes the complexity of existence as a marginalized person in Appalachia. Garringer also acknowledges the difficulty in addressing these questions of identity and belonging: “This, too, is a part of the place I call home. And not talking about these horrific truths is a way of protecting them, condoning them, even” (46).

It’s hard not to feel sad reading the collection, but there are also lovely moments of love and hope—not naive hope—but the kind that we struggle for and progress towards, even if it still feels disheartening to fight for it constantly. Rosenthal’s segment, “A Queer Place Called Home” (63-70) was the most comforting read in the work. It offered a glimpse of a future for queer life and love in Appalachia. I suppose the collection answers the questions the authors raise by showing that home might not necessarily be someplace to return to, but instead something to create. D. Stump writes, “We find meaning in all the places meaning calls to us. We find home in all the places that invite us to sit at the table and eat” (82).

In the final pages, Jent returns, telling readers that “this world loves me too” (83-84). I finished To Belong Here feeling exhausted and a little sad, but mostly grateful for the book and the voices it holds—an undeniable proof that we’re here, creating and continuing.

Allison Quinlan now feels more conflicted about missing home. They are a nonprofit manager and teacher currently living in Scotland (originally from rural Georgia, United States).

Reflections in a Rearview Mirror
Teya Schaffer
2025, 54 pages
$10.95

Reviewed by Judith Katz

Teya Schaffer’s short volume of prose and poetry begins with a piece called “Appreciations.” It’s a conversation between an unnamed narrator and a street woman she calls Valerie—aka the “dog lady”—that takes place as the two sit on a curb in San Francisco circa 1970 or 1980. As the two talk companionably about the Free Clinic, women’s land, and animal rights, they are interrupted not once but twice by a man who aggressively approaches and insults them, excoriating the narrator for her masculine appearance. Her friend Valerie ignores the man. Our narrator takes Valerie’s lead, and the man eventually goes away.

I read “Appreciations” decades ago in a journal called Common Lives/Lesbian Lives in issue number seven, Spring 1983 (65-68). It struck me then, as it strikes me now, as a vivid picture of that San Francisco street life. But it also strikes me as a vivid reminder that attacks—verbal and physical—on our queer bodies are not anything new.

Other stories in this slim collection explore difficult and important relationships. “A Letter to San Francisco” is a painful correspondence between a woman who finds her lesbian footing in San Francisco and her closeted, married lover, originally published in Sinister Wisdom: 31 Winter 1987 (67-71). “With Love, Lena” is an aging Holocaust survivor’s reminiscence of her secret lover in New York City on the occasion of her death. It is a powerful story about survival in all of its forms, and though it was first published in Sinister Wisdom: 29/30 The Tribe of Dina, A Jewish Women’s Anthology (157-158) last century, it still is as powerful today.

The poems and stories in Reflections in a Rearview Mirror talk about illness, motherhood, and widowhood—all within the framework of what it means to be an out lesbian—in the late 1900s and now, in the early 2000s. They are frank, powerful, and moving reminders—a kind of historical document but also a road map of what it still means to be a lesbian, a mother, an ex-lover, a widow, and a wife, even now, in this perilous and treacherous time.

Judith Katz is the author of two novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, which won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She is currently working on sequels to both novels and is still meditating on her novel in a drawer, The Atomic Age.

Swagger: A Celebration of the Butch Experience
Curated by Rae Theodore and edited by Nat Burns
Flashpoint Publications, 2024, 174 pages
$16.95

“And think about / How much I love / Butches / And the people / Who love them”

(“Butch 4 Butch,” Beck Guerra Carter, 72).

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Swagger is a celebration and an exploration of the identity, history, and community of butch lesbians. Whether you identify as butch or simply want to understand butchness in its multifaceted glory, this work offers great insight and connection. The work begins with artwork such as “Gender” by Ash, and unfolds into retellings and stories from elder butches and poetry that captures the spirit of butch existence. One of the earlier sections written by Merril Mushroom—a name familiar to many Sinister Wisdom readers—announces the book’s intention to define, complicate, and joyfully celebrate butchness, beginning with a non-rigid definition of ‘butch.’ Her words set the tone for the rest of the compilation of voices adding to the conversation on being butch, and reminding readers that defining butchness can be both simple and complex.

The book continually grapples with key questions: What does it mean to be butch? How do we see, define, or know it within ourselves? The explorations in Swagger are as varied as the individuals writing them, but every work has some exploration of these questions, and many presented answers! Georgie Orion lets us know that butches can be anyone—“Lesbians from Girl Scouts. Lesbians from camp. Lesbians from church. Lesbians from school. Basically every grown-up lesbian I had ever met. And they all showed up” (21). Understandings of the intersection between community and the celebration of a shared, comfortable, normalized identity were present all through the work. In addition to descriptions of building a shared community, the topic of self-creation features in several pieces.

The question of masculinity and the boundaries of emulation versus reclamation, which I have always considered a distinctly butch expression, is a recurrent theme. Virginia Black writes,

“While I have emulated men and masculine presentation, I have never wanted to be one, nor felt the need to defend my space as a lesbian against a man…unless he was trying to manspread on public transportation, so I did it first to prove a point. How straight men perceive me doesn’t shape my self-definition” (26).

Cindy Rizzo’s “City Butch” grapples with the insecurities that accompany socially constructed butch stereotypes and reaffirms the confidence to define oneself. She writes, “How far could I stray from a stereotype so I could be true to myself?. . . I knew in spite of everything that I was a butch” (28). The answer to the questions of identity definition and constructed lines aren’t explicit, but several pieces set out that identity can be self-determined and fluid. Virginia Black closes their work by noting the possibility inherent to her self-determination of butchness. How should she define herself and her butchness? They write, “Exhale. / However I want” (27).

Swagger honors the vibrant past of butchness while embracing the ever-evolving diversity of butch identity (and ever-evolving understanding of butch identity). Several authors in the collection touch on trans identity and butchness, which is important in a collection like Swagger. As Audre Lorde writes, “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives” (Sister Outsider, 138). Transphobic rhetoric persists, even in queer communities, erasing the contributions of the people at the forefront of the fight for liberation. Transness is celebrated in this work, too. Swagger sets up a conversation to challenge misconceptions that masculine presentation determines gender or that gender identity and gender performance are inherently the same. The collection also makes it clear that socially drawn lines can become tools of resistance and experimentation.

Finally, I loved reading the authors’ biographies at the end of the work, not only because it gave me insight into the identities of the people creating but also because it provided information on connecting. If you couldn’t tell from my earlier havering on community and connection, I consider it a vital aspect of the queer community, so it was lovely to find these incredible people compiled at the end of the work. Swagger embodies queer community and connection in a really beautiful way. Every butch joyfully existing is evidence of a queer future, so I’ll leave you with Victoria Anne Darling’s rallying words, “Don’t, don’t, don’t / Tone it down” (33).

Allison Quinlan (they/she) volunteers as a copyeditor for Sinister Wisdom and manages a non-profit in the UK that supports survivors of abuse. They’re exceptionally bad at keeping lavender plants alive. . . one could say they’ve become a lavender menace.

A Map of My Want
Faylita Hicks
Haymarket Books, 2024, 94 pages
$17.00

Reviewed by Dot Persica

During my very first very long lesbian relationship, I gifted my then-girlfriend a copy of The Essential June Jordan. In it, I wrote something along the lines of “this book is mine which means it’s yours which means it’s ours.” This year, I got it back neatly packed in a big cardboard ramen box with (some of) my clothes, my old DS, and some other books. Which means it is now mine alone. As is my copy of A Map of My Want, by Faylita Hicks.

“I blinked and we were in love—
then out of love—

then child-shaped again—then not.
Then both of us alone. Together.
The both of us crying into the empty
of our kitchen sinks.

Jesus—how did we
get here, again?”

(Hicks, “BONFIRE BRIDES,” 29).

June Jordan’s work first taught me that poetry could be something else entirely, beyond rhymes and form, that the idea that one might have to sacrifice content for form is entirely false. June Jordan taught me to see poetry as a weapon.

Reading Faylita Hicks, I held June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Emily Dickinson close, as tools to better comprehend what I was interacting with. Lorde and Dickinson are quoted in the book, along with a variety of other writers—Jordan and Giovanni are voices I heard echoing through some of the pages even without them being named. It is their irreverence that I found again in Hicks’ work.

Readers are immediately pulled into Hicks’ world: there is no time for pleasantries, the urgency of Hicks’ voice and the vivid descriptions of images, smells, textures, and specific scenarios create an inescapable sensory trip from the very start. The book is divided in four sections: ALCHEMY, LIFE, LIBERTY, and THE PURSUIT. The omnipresence of the erotic is palpable throughout the book, with the erotic being a natural phenomenon:

“Staring out into this abyss of bush I counted

millions of solar flares, each of them fingering
the ultraviolet of evening, a tinted mimosa

pressing its silk mouth to my swollen knees”

(Hicks, “CHIRON’S BEACH,” 9).

Hicks writes unabashedly about sex and gender, explicit without shame, “What if I was heavy between the legs? What would it feel like to hang my body from a machine—to feel the trickle of time between my skin and shift?” (Hicks, “STEEL HORSES,” 5).

“Who I am now—a kind of boi traveling south//southwest: as far as the stars will
take me

into the land coughing up all of my names, the skin of the road warm (...)”

(Hicks, “ON BECOMING A BRIDGE FOR THE BINARY,” 6).

Parallels are drawn between nature and the body, where one is a metaphor for the other, because they are ultimately the same; borders, frontiers, jails: attempts to contain a body that is meant to be free. Similarly, life and death are also companions who give and take from each other.

Natural disasters are very present in this collection, since Hicks is from California and central Texas, and frequently draws from their experience. Storms and fires are both metaphor and reality, both political and personal—one of the biggest manifestations of the damage done by capitalism, and especially interesting because they don’t discriminate. While the most exploited countries and populations are the ones paying the price of Western climate terrorism, eventually these disasters will catch up with their perpetrators and not even the richest among us will be spared.

Protest in all forms is also an all-encompassing theme, and on these pages the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Sandra Bland appear, sparking deeper analyses about America’s constant attempts to disappear Black life, be it by murder, imprisonment, or both. Hicks writes about their life during and after their captivity in the Hays County Jail, and the mental toll of imprisonment.

“For weeks, I forget what the sun felt like.
I forget I was once loved. I forget affection”

(Hicks, “RELEASE||RELEASE,” 58).

One truly cannot imagine what it means to be imprisoned in America if one has not lived it, and Hicks’ courageous voice forces readers to look right when they would rather close their eyes. It is necessary to see these evils if we are to eradicate them.

Hicks’ work is furiously loving, filled to the brim with hope for their communities, their comrades, their friends, their loved ones, love of their latinidad, love for revolution.

“my city is a river
of college students destined to be
swallowed by the rural expanse
of the Guadalupe.

En protesta, we comrades float
outside of the federal building,
—the county jail where I was buried—
En la lucha! against
the waves of the recently shipped,
the waves of the soon to be drowned,
and the waves of white faces swimming
happily in and out of the front doors”

(Hicks, “DO NOT CALL US BY OUR DEAD NAMES: A DOCUPOEM,” 60).

Hicks unites nature, sex, protest, race, gender, justice, and remembrance in this collection, which will speak to anyone who feels strongly about freedom in its many definitions.

Dot Persica (any pronouns) is a lesbian performer born in Naples, Italy. They are a classically trained soprano with some dance training; they have experience directing opera, helping out on film sets, and doing stand-up. They are a cofounder of the italian lesbian+ collective STRASAFFICA* with which they have organized community events, raised funds, published zines and created beautiful bonds. They also write poetry, like all lesbians.

Iridescent Pigeons
Candace Walsh
Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2024, 82 pages
$17.99

Reviewed by Pelaya Arapakis

Iridescent Pigeons is a fitting title for Candace Walsh’s enchanting debut—a body of work that ponders the many contours of love, that rejoices in the splendour of the everyday and the profound beauty of the overlooked and discounted. In this chapbook, Walsh traverses seamlessly across time and poetic forms, tracing themes of queer love, desire, nature, loss, motherhood, childhood, and the engravings of trauma. Each poem teems with life, beckoning readers to take a second glance, to embrace stillness, drawing us into a heightened state of awareness of ourselves and the environment around us.

Images of nature abound in Iridescent Pigeons as Walsh revels in both the fecundity and the awe-inspiring intricacies of ecological design. In “Then Suddenly I Know” Walsh exults the healing properties bestowed by nature: “Sometimes I can’t get back to sleep, / while lemon balm breathes / let me soothe you beyond the window screen / and frogsong trembles webs seedpearled with dew” (40). Walsh’s poems unveil worlds within worlds that only begin to unfurl to those who remain attentive and curious, to those “who do not shirk from hills and swerves and barks” (17). However, nature is not just a physical phenomenon in these poems, but a site of memory imbued with deep evocative power.

Walsh pays homage to the many queer women poets who came before her, thus situating her work as part of a long lineage of lesbian and queer love poetry and writing. Virginia Woolf is celebrated in Walsh’s cento “Wild and Frail and Beautiful,” composed of lines from Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room. Woolf is again invoked in the poem “I Want To See You in the Lamplight, in Your Emeralds,” (21) the very title of which is a sentence from a love letter written by Woolf to Vita Sackville-West in 1927. The influence of Sappho is also apparent in Walsh’s use of the sapphic stanza. Midway through the collection, “Sapphic stanza 1,” “Sapphic stanza 2,” and “Sapphic stanza 3” connect readers directly to this vibrant queer legacy of desire-driven poetry. Indeed, much of Sappho’s oeuvre today only exists in fragments, and Walsh’s completed compositions can be read not only as a commemoration of the poet, but as a process of historical restoration. However, Sappho’s impact extends beyond poetic form to Walsh’s use of the natural world as a metaphor for queer love and sensuality. In the poem “Not Fell but Fall” Walsh muses, “How do oceans feel / about these languid vagabonds? / Against her skin I knew, I think, / how seaweed feels. / The sea must feel a thing like love” (5).

Iridescent Pigeons speaks to how queer women have historically articulated desire for one another in coded ways, negotiating through a labyrinth of social hostility and marginalisation. Walsh’s poem “Lesbians and Their Dogs” poignantly reflects on this reality: “I think of dogs with docked tails, / their bumpy rumps wagging nothing. / It reminds me of queer love, / how they used to try to / cut off or drug-numb what offended, / how we sniffed out the invisible / and guess-read the signals” (59). These lines honour the lesbians and queer women throughout history who have loved quietly, transgressively, and ferociously in spite of structures that sought/seek to deny our longings and desires. We continue to love because “We know how much it costs / to cut it off” (59).

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