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.

First Love: Essays on Friendship
Lilly Dancyger
The Dial Press, 2024, 224 pages
$30.00

Reviewed by Leslie Lopez

“To nurture and care for another person, to provide them with tenderness and emotional shelter from the world that mostly doesn’t give a shit about them. To love so fiercely and with such unrestraint that the recipient of that love feels sustained by it, and never feels fully alone in the world. This is what my closest friends give to me, and what I try to give to them” (138).

Lilly Dancyger’s First Love: Essays on Friendship is an honoring of female friendship and the ways these relationships become early sites of platonic intimacy.

Dancyger opens this collection by sharing that her cousin, Sabina, was her first love. From being children who created new words to describe their love for each other to spending time together at different points in their adolescence, each anecdote shows the connection between them remaining strong despite the physical distance and circumstances of life. It’s not a surprise that Dancyger comes to see friendship as synonymous with vulnerability, deep love, and belonging.

But First Love is also about grief. When Sabina is brutally murdered a few weeks shy of her twenty-first birthday, it’s the powerful friendships Dancyger has cultivated that keep her treading above water. These relationships are the basis for the fifteen essays, each one providing an additional cultural layer or personal memory that moves the collection along.

In “The Fire Escape,” Dancyger recounts living with her friend in a crammed East Village apartment. She goes on to describe how the rusted metal perch outside their kitchen window became a space for the friends to connect over cigarettes and alcohol, even after Sabina’s death. She goes on to say of her friends, “Not one of them tried to persuade me to come inside, and for that I loved them more than ever” (108). Thus, the fire escape provided Dancyger the freedom to grieve, exist, and be cared for in a time of tremendous pain.

Dancyger’s writing about friendship also includes a discussion of her fractured relationship with her mother and her indecision about becoming a parent. In “Mutual Mothering,” she shares, “What I do know is that when I imagine what kind of mother I would be, it’s the kind of friend I’ve been that allows me to see it clearly, and to believe I’d do it well” (161). It’s this honesty and unabashed importance of platonic relationships that feels refreshing, especially in a culture that puts romantic relationships on a pedestal and sells the narrative that traditional family is the only real source of care.

Reading First Love served as a reminder that grief can also be an exploration of what it means to have loved, been loved, and continue loving in a world as simultaneously scary and joyous as ours.

Leslie Lopez (she/they) is a Dallas-born, Chicago-based writer pursuing a Master’s of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She can often be found crocheting (badly), laughing (loudly), and reviewing books on her Instagram, @anotherlesbrarian.

Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows
Megan Milks
Feminist Press, 2026, 336 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by [sarah] Cavar

Milk: It’s everywhere, in everything (12). So says Megan Milks in Mega Milk, a wide-ranging reflection on race, gender, size, species, and milk, a secretion that looms large in the U.S. corporate-cultural zeitgeist. Milk has undergone something of a transition in the decades since Milks’s childhood, shifting shape from a hallmark of the healthy, all-American, and notably white diet, into something of a commercial downward spiral, blame for which has been attributed to anything from Gen Z, to veganism, to allergies. With this fluidity in mind, Milks is invested in the “trans potentiality of milk” (28), the capacity of the fluid to shift shape and meaning not only in rhetoric, but in the bodyminds of those who produce, exchange, and consume it.

In approaching milk’s trans potentiality, Milks begins with what might be understood as the cis potential of milk, detailing the lives of cows subjected to abusive breeding and milking regimes, either as incubators or as inseminators. For Milks, the lived experience of cows is entangled both with life-giving (sustenance for their late cat, Claude) and life-taking (the premature killing of those cows that have outlived their “production value” [86] as well as the suffering of migrant workers, including children, forced to work on these farms). Likewise, they acknowledge that, as a formula-fed baby, cows have been something of a “foster mother” (132) to them—coming into uncomfortable proximity with the racialized and classed position of prior centuries’ wet nurses.

The trans potentiality of milk also emerges in its crossings from word, to name, to material necessity. “Milk,” as a word, summons “cow,” a term appended to fat, feminized people, Milks’s child-self included. Milk, and its absence, becomes symbolic of Milks’s disordered eating. Additionally, the material attachment of milk to the breast—and, by extension, to femininity, motherhood, and the concept of femaleness itself—is rich territory for trans exploration: in “The Letdown: Lactation Suite,” Milks historicizes their relationship to a body coercively assigned female at birth; the complexities of binding, intimacy, and self-knowledge; and to the expectations and demands placed upon nursing parents.

Much like the contradictory expectations placed upon trans people—both to transition “fully” for legitimacy’s sake, and not to transition at all—nursing parents (understood as “mothers”) face dual pressure to embrace the “naturalness” of the breast and to embrace the science of formula so as to preserve their looks and properly nourish their children. This places people of marginalized genders, whether nursing or not, into what Milks correctly puns a “double-bind”: there is no way to fully satisfy a cisheteropatriarchal system in its insatiable hunger for subjugation across species, gender, and positionality.

Race, too, is implicated in the commercial and symbolic impacts of milk, particularly for the U.S. In the essay “MAGA Milk,” Milks quotes a speech by then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in 1923: “Upon this industry, more than any other of the food industries, depends not alone the problem of public health, but there depend upon it the very growth and virility of the white race” (172). Indeed, the racialization of milk—not to mention its embeddedness in systems of white, christian supremacy—extend further back than U.S. empire: in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, breastmilk was understood as excess menstrual blood, saved and transmuted in order to feed newborn babies. “Bad milk,” including milk contaminated by unsanitary dairy practices, was an affront not only to a baby’s health but to its selfhood, a kind of ontological contamination informed by racist, classist ideologies. Later, after a cultural flip spurred on by the American eugenics movement, healthy, “pure” milk became a hallmark of the fit family—once again, milk consumption (albeit of a different kind) was a prerequisite for purity, goodness, and normality.

It is no surprise, then, that Milks’s best moments in this collection are moments of profound impurity—moments where their thoughts cross from human to nonhuman, diluting the myths of fitness and purity the image of milk now offers. Milks, in escaping themself, escapes the inevitable inadequacies of anthropocentric interpretation when attempting to approach nonhuman ways of knowing. In the startling essay “Milking the Bull,” Milks decides to inseminate themself with the sperm of a bull, and in so doing, internalizes and ultimately reproduces his story in a queer, literary (re)birth. The latter pages of the essay are devoted not to Milks’s experiences, but the bull’s, and the reader follows the narrative to his life’s inevitable end. This essay—perhaps the most uncomfortable in the entire collection—is a highlight, both for its taboo subject matter and for the empathy and intentionality of its portrayal. In this moment, more than any other, Milks sits in the crevice between their body and another’s, and asks what it means to cross that boundary, to trans it, together.

As a constellation of essays on milk’s many meanings and potentialities, Mega Milk is deeply, powerfully uncomfortable. At times, I felt impatient with the text, eager to move from moments of observation and reflection to critical analysis, particularly regarding the nonhuman animals on whose bodily fluids the book relies. Particularly in moments where milk is present but its nonhuman producers, notably, are absent (such as in “Tres Leches”), it feels as though cows are a specter haunting a story that tries to be about something else—about gender, about economics, about family, about identity. While touching on the ethical and environmental urgency of critique, Mega Milk is persistently reflective in a way I did not expect, and struggle to collect my feelings about.

At the same time, Milks anticipates my critique, meets it before it escapes my mouth, or my hands, onto the page. “No, it’s personal essays,” they explain to a Hindu physical therapist, who asks if the collection is “making a case against dairy” (265). In a roundabout way, Milks has, throughout the course of the text, called out some of my own bona fides: whiteness and rurality of upbringing, transness and chosen distance from the “femaleness” yoked to us from birth, experiences of restrictive, disorderly eating. Then there is veganism, part of my life for twelve of my twenty-seven years, and the attendant expectations that this collection do the polemic work that it neither claims nor seeks to do. This is a trans book, a queer book, a book about openings and potentialities. There exist dozens of polemics describing accurately and in detail the evils of industrial animal agriculture, not to mention the white supremacist nationalisms embedded in American food production and distribution. So I let the text rest, took time to think. Let my thoughts gestate, squeeze out what remains. And at that ending is how I begin this review.

[sarah] Cavar is the author of Failure to Comply (featherproof books, 2024) and Differential Diagnosis (Northwestern University Press, 2026). They hold a PhD in Cultural Studies and Science & Technology Studies from the University of California, Davis, and can be found online at www.cavar.club, @cavar on bluesky, and at librarycard.beehiiv.com.

Fragments of Wasted Devotion
Mia Arias Tsang, illustrated by Levi Wells
Quilted Press, 2025, 144 pages
$16.00

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Fragments of Wasted Devotion is an incredibly self-descriptive title. Before reading, I assumed it was the poetic, hooking title that so many collections use (and then vaguely connect to one piece in the work), but no, this is simply a collection of Tsang’s fragments of wasted devotions. She sets the reader up to know the story won’t end well: “My heart was too young to be settled,” and she proceeds to become devoted anyway: “but I laid it down on your chest anyway” (1). From the first line, she presents the reader with the question: What does one do with unrequited devotion?

The ‘fragments’ aspect of the title rings true as well. Each work tosses you into a story with little to no context, and you certainly won’t find out the conclusion here, either. Readers see a fragmented narrative where the only throughline you can grasp is the devotion, again and again, no matter the person, place, or time. I struggled with this a bit, but I think that’s because I personally wrestle with more poetic vignettes like this work, not due to any flaw in the book. However, given that the fragments of Tsang’s wasted devotions are the heart of this collection, I found this fragmented presentation of vignettes clever and intriguing.

I deeply appreciated the honesty in her writing. Who hasn’t wondered how to hold someone in their heart if they can’t “eat my groceries before they rot?” (8). You don’t have to have your whole life together to love someone deeply. Tsang also dips into the complicated truth of loving someone who has hurt you (I’m also a firm believer in holding love and anger in your heart at the same time). “Melatonin Dreams” is a three-part piece where Tsang describes the pain of recurring dreams about her partner; a house in New Haven that’s long, brown, and green “like a shotgun. . . I’m ready for you to blow my head off again” (34) and then writes, “I am still trying to protect you from the rage of everyone who wants me to be happy” (35). Don’t we all know it—you have long conversations with family and friends, tearing apart someone for how they treated you, but you have that inexplicable urge to defend them (not their actions necessarily, just them). It can feel hard to hate someone you’ve seen humanity in, no matter how they left you. She finishes, “It’s hell to be trapped behind my own eyes, letting you happen to me when I’m supposed to have control here” (38).

How much these experiences are actually in Tsang’s control, I’m not sure. She writes, “I am on edge and I am breaking my life to get to you because that is what I do for what I love” (42), and she buys the bus ticket, crossing cities to reach someone one hundred and forty-three point three miles away. And again, she writes that the people she loves ask, in horror, “Why do you keep doing this to yourself?” (44). But Tsang answers her own questions, and mine, and those of the people who love her, when she writes, “I touch the feral creature of my heart and ask is there anything left to give and it howls yes yes yes forever” (42). “Longing Distance” was my favourite section of the collection because it replicates a feeling I think many of us have experienced, to some degree, of putting the world on hold to get to someone we love who doesn’t necessarily return the effort. “I shouldn’t have had to beg,” she writes, “I wish I could want anything else” (67–68).

So what does one do with unrequited devotion? The reader is welcome to find their own answer. Tsang, for her part, “fade[s] to black with a heart bursting with all the love you wouldn’t take and I know I’ll forgive you anything” (111).

Lastly, on page 15, there is an illustration of a little creature with a face like this: (•⤙•), and I love it. I didn’t write about all the illustrations, but every one was absolutely gorgeous, full of whimsy, and engaging.

Allison Quinlan is a PhD student in Scotland and might be the world’s slowest writer.

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.

Loving Corrections
adrienne maree brown
AK Press, 2024, 200 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

Loving Corrections is adrienne maree brown’s most relational book yet, exploring how communities can get “specific, and deeper, when we have accumulated the wisdom to challenge harmful norms of privilege and power” (4). brown wants us all to retain a curious posture in the face of diverse people and problems. Readers are invited to confront uncomfortable truths about their own biases—and how to confront others’—in the name of a love for our collective future.

brown did not write Loving Corrections to police activists, reprimanding them for not believing the right things or living out their solidarity in a specific way—in fact, brown’s essays rarely contain explicit political positions that may divide her audience. Instead, there is an entire chapter titled, “Righting Solidarity: Flocking Together.” She wisely shares that “confusion is a colonial tactic,” meaning that a lack of community between oppressed groups creates dissociation from intersectional issues that could be reconciled with a robust solidarity (85). Relationships come first in activism, brown believes, and it is the work of the activist to flock “with the people,” not to be in a position of power that confuses or fractures groups (92, italics brown’s).

In the chapter “Love Looks Like Accountability,” brown dives deep into how our personal relationships can have a ripple effect on how our society functions. In a digital world where “therapy speak” is often used incorrectly or in harmful ways, this chapter is a wonderful refresher on how we can love ourselves and others through the right ways of engaging in relationships. brown quotes Prentis Hemphill: “boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously” (153). brown writes about how we must be responsible for our internal state and how it might impact others, how we must apologize and receive apologies, and how to know when it is best to let a relationship go. These feel like simple emotional teachings we learn in elementary school, but later in life, our capitalist system does not reward this loving behavior. Starting small with improving love in everyday relationships will create a more accountable and loving society.

In the conclusion to Loving Corrections, brown reveals that this is the last time she will write specifically for those “active in movements for social and environmental change” (189). This does not mean her work, nor ours, is close to finished. Loving Corrections is the sixth book that brown has written in the Emergent Strategy Series—which contains thirteen books in total—and oh boy, what a comprehensive and necessary series it is. These books are gentle yet mighty tools for activists and their communities. Loving Corrections affirms that, always, “there is love at the center” (7).

Courtney Heidorn (she/they) is an Assistant Editor for Chestnut Review and holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Azusa Pacific University. You can see more of their work in their chapbook, Palimpsest, from Bottlecap Press and in CURIOUS Magazine and Pearl Press. Find them on Instagram and Substack @palimpsestpoems.

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).

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.

The Weird Sister Collection: Writing at the Intersections of Feminism, Literature, and Pop Culture
Edited by Marisa Crawford
Feminist Press, 2024, 264 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Gabe Tejada

With the resurgence of books, largely due to readers on social media, an integral part of the literary ecosystem seems to have been neglected: the literary magazine. The Weird Sister Collection—a book edited by Marisa Crawford—is a timely homage to that particular species of the literary and art magazine: the blog.

The collection begins with a foreword by Michelle Tea, dyke queen of the countercultural 1990s lesbian literary scene. Tea writes, “Something that had felt so private and obscure to me had also been found and claimed by others” (xii), a feeling I’m sure was shared by each one of us upon discovering Sinister Wisdom, whether in its inception back in 1976 or doom-stumbling onto its Instagram account in 2024. Here, as in the Weird Sister book and blog, we write about “(our) feminist history, (our) places in the past, and the feminism we’re all making right now” (xii). Lovers of literary magazines will feel at home in the eclectic—yet cohesive—mix of art critique, politically engaged personal (or personally engaged political) narratives, and cultural commentary found in this collection. Though divided into seven thematic categories, including “Talking Back to the Canon,” “Double, Double Pop Culture Trouble,” and “Performance, Identity, and Public Space,” each piece fuses high and low art as well as popular and obscure cultural references to capture the feminist millennial milieu of its writers.

Sam Cohen’s “I am Jenny Schecter, Please Love Me” was a vindication, not just for Jenny, but for all the LAGs (lesbians after graduation) like her. How after a certain age, the certainty of one’s queer identity is expected, with those still dis/uncovering their queerness seen to be lagging behind. “We Were There: Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter at the New Museum” by Hossannah Asuncion was an institutional critique through “the care of the (Black woman’s) body” (200). In naming all of the artists involved, through their text Asuncion extends the reclamation of cultural space that is often denied Black women artists—a continuation of the care underpinning the collective’s actions. Similarly, Megan Milks’ piece on Barbara Grier’s pseudonyms also contends with (literary) space. At the same time that they acknowledge Grier’s contributions to lesbian literature, Milks points out how Grier’s plethora of pseudonyms led to her monopolization of lesbian/queer space. On the other hand, Soleil Ho’s piece—also involving a nom de plume—is a searing reminder of the pitfalls of tokenistic diversity and inclusion. The title, “Yi-Fen Chou and the Man Who Wore Her,” shows how easily our marginalizations can be appropriated and weaponized against us, echoing the long history of the white man’s abuse of our bodies.

The Weird Sister Collection is an eclectic concoction of essays and narratives. Inside its pages, feminist and queer readers and activists will find writing that will both comfort and challenge them.

Gabe Tejada is an emerging arts writer and student based in Naarm.