subscribedonate

Wild Shrew Literary Review

Wild Shrew Literary Review


Wild Shrew Literary Review (WSLR) publishes online book reviews. While WSLR is book-focused, we are open to accepting reviews of other media such as films, art exhibits, and author Q&As. Reviews should be about 400–700 words if on a single book, 1,300–1,500 words if on 3–5 books, 1,200–1,500 words if it’s a book excerpt, and up to 2,000 words if it’s an author Q&A. For monthly lists of new books available to review, see this page. Please contact the WSLR editor, Chloe Berger (chloe at sinisterwisdom dot org) if you would like to write a review or if you have any questions.

You can view this book review template to get a sense of what you should include in the review. Please refer to the Sinister Snapshot Style Manual, as the WSLR style is similar.

Welcome to Wild Shrew Literary Review!

Masthead

shrew illustration

Follow WSLR on Social Media

Instagram YouTube

Reviews by Genre:

Fiction
Non-fiction
Poetry
Film
Interview

Latest Reviews:

Scroll horizontally to explore our collection of reviews.


Ophelia Cover
Rory Frasch Reviews Opheliaby S.M. Namkoong
“S.M. Namkoong’s debut novel, Ophelia, is a fantastic take on the gothic genre. Namkoong explores the morality of classic vampire stories with a sympathetic, yet critical gaze.”


Nymph Cover
Molly Hunken Reviews Nymph by Sofia Montrone
“Readers will be drawn in by the beauty of the protagonist Leo’s small-town life, unable to look away from the unfolding events of her family drama, and moved by the skillfully articulated realities of Leo’s first experience with all-consuming sapphic love.”


Queer Modernism: 1900–1950 cover
Angela Acosta Reviews Queer Modernism: 1900–1950 edited by Susanne Gaensheimer, Isabella Malz, and Anke Kempkes
“The six thematic chapters span pastoral themes, Sapphic modernism, surrealism, abstraction, intimate networks, and queer resistance.”


Isabelle Drake Reviews Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone
“Other Influences is a collection of vibrant essays by a diverse group of key feminist avant-garde poets that focuses on community, philosophy, resistance, race, class, gender, and sexuality, among other topics.”


Sam Carter Reviews To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage
“From those uncritically nostalgic toward their Cherokee heritage, to those who want nothing to do with it, to those who were divorced from their history and culture in infancy, Ramage displays an amalgamation of experience that never feels too convoluted or rushed.”


Beth Brown Preston Reviews Bloodmercy by I.S. Jones
“To the poet, ‘blood’ represents a bond, familial connections, and trust, despite the dysfunction of her childhood. These poems explore the meaning of violence, desire, queerness, faith, power, and control.”


Rivaa Ubrani Reviews Hauntings by Vernon Lee, in conversation with Gretchen Felker-Martin and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
“Lee’s tales, with their ambiguous endings and psychological half-thrills, are in a sense deeply queer stories.”


Kara Zajac Reviews The Soulmate Strategy: My Imperfect Plan to Conquer Heartbreak and Find True Love by Corey Seemiller
“This book is for anyone who has struggled with perfectionism, and offers the reader a chance to learn through someone else’s struggle to heal and move past their childhood trauma, finding love tightly packaged with endearment, laughter, and sensitivity.”


Ellen Miller-Mack Reviews Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems by Robin Becker
“Robin Becker has been serving poetry superbly for decades. She illuminates the small truths of our lives with clarity. For those who identify as feminist, lesbian, or Jew, Becker’s poetry is both validation and celebration.”


Nino Arobelidze Reviews Crying in LA: Sapphic Longing in Tongues and Tears by Jasmin Benward
“Crying in LA offers a portrait of Black sapphic longing that is sensual, funny, political, wounded, and luminous. Benward’s collection reminds readers that to desire deeply is also to risk deeply, and that telling the truth about that risk is its own form of power.”


Marisa Lin Reviews DEAD BOYS IN SPACE by Sara Youngblood Gregory
“DEAD BOYS IN SPACE is an imaginative fusion of lyricism, experimental forms, and speculative fiction that explores otherness, grief, illness, and queer resistance in American history.”


Rhea Rollmann Reviews I Remember Her by Natalie Clifford Barney, translated by Suzanne Stroh
“I Remember Her is a must for fans of Sapphic poetry and history alike, valuable as much for its extensive essay on Barney’s life as for the beauty and rhythm of the translated prose poems.”


Leslie Lopez Reviews First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger
“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.”


Kara L. Zajac Reviews Missing Sam by Thrity Umrigar
“Umrigar’s lyrical, yet fast-paced writing will leave you wanting more, staying up later than your bedtime because you just can’t put it down. Missing Sam is a great, thought-provoking, heart-string-tugging read.”


Kelsey McGarry Reviews All Fours by Miranda July
“All Fours celebrates the small, often overlooked moments that shape our lives. The interactions with friends, strangers, and fleeting encounters carry weight because July writes them with an intimate precision that lingers.”


[sarah] Cavar Reviews Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows by Megan Milks
“Milks is invested in the ‘trans potentiality of milk,’ 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.”


Kelsey McGarry Reviews Big Swiss by Jen Beagin
“With its distinctive voice, unconventional structure, and memorable protagonists, this book offers a bold and darkly playful exploration of intimacy, secrecy, and connection.”


Jenny Wong Reviews Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss
“The language in this collection is both visual and visceral, blending the starkness of reality with a soft filter of the surreal.”


Cheyenne Stone Reviews The Sea Gives Up the Dead by Molly Olguín
“These stories show us what can be when what dies is our old, ill-fitting selves, our resentments, and our attachments to how we think things should be instead of how they could be.”


Ash Lev Reviews Baby Blue by Bim Eriksson, translated by Melissa Bowers
“Eriksson’s graphic novel is an imaginative, absurd, visually striking, read-in-one-sitting type of book.”


Ruby Stefanucci Reviews The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
“The Safekeep follows two women softly becoming home to one another, and is a uniquely brilliant work of literature that I undoubtedly recommend.”


Allison Quinlan Reviews Sex Beyond “Yes”: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone by Quill R. Kukla
“If our only understanding of sex rests on a yes/no binary, a binary of simply avoiding harm rather than exploring pleasure, we can miss the conversations, cues, invitations, curiosity, and mutual building that sexual relationships need to move into those safe and ethical experiences.”


Ruby Stefanucci Reviews Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab
“Brought to life by complex queer protagonists, Bury Our Bones is a provocative, haunting exploration of desire, hunger, and the cost of immortality.”


Allison Quinlan Reviews In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
“Machado writes, ‘Narratives about abuse in queer relationships—whether acutely violent or not—are tricky. . . Our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean.’”


Allison Quinlan Reviews Trans Femme Futures: An Abolitionist Ethic for Transfeminist Worlds by Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift
“Breaking out of assigned femme ideals is as much a method of active disruption as it is of creating an existence that is one’s own, rejecting conformity to yet another gendered expectation.”


Martha Miller Reviews Leaving Home at 83 by Sandra Butler
“This is a well-written, humorous book. We find that while Butler must work to adjust to things at Desert Manor, she becomes friends with most residents, and they adjust to her.”


Courtney Heidorn Reviews The Night Alphabet by Joelle Taylor
“If you want an exercise in empathy, a kaleidoscope of short stories, and a rolodex of unruly women, Joelle Taylor’s debut novel is for you.”


Grace Gaynor Reviews Sympathy for Wild Girls by Demree McGhee
“In Sympathy for Wild Girls, experiences and knowledges associated with Black, queer womanhood are expertly infused into subtly surreal stories.”


Martha Miller Reviews Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade
“Stein may be called less a writer in the conventional sense than a philosopher of language. As a woman with a wife, I liked the phrase, ‘My wife my life is my life is my wife.’”


Evelyn C. White Reviews How to Sleep at Night by Elizabeth Harris
“Elizabeth Harris, an openly lesbian New York Times reporter, delivers a dynamic cast of characters working to reconcile their ambitions with the vagaries of life.”


Allison Quinlan Reviews Fragments of Wasted Devotion by Mia Arias Tsang, illustrated by Levi Wells
“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.”


Cassandra Langer Reviews All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation by Elizabeth Gilbert
“Gilbert’s memoir is a wild mosaic, equal parts emotional demolition derby, spiritual travelogue, queer romance, and New Age interpretive dance.”


Atlanta Tsiaoukkas Reviews Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA by Amy Erdman Farrell
“Farrell has provided a definitive account of the Girl Scouts which builds remarkably on previous histories in breadth, perceptiveness, and a willingness to acknowledge the organisation’s complicity in regimes of oppression.”


Atlanta Tsiaoukkas Reviews Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen by Sarah E. Maier and Rachel M. Friars
“Maier and Friars tell a contemporary nuanced story about declining spectacle in the depiction of neo-Victorian lesbian performances while emphasizing the emotional dimensions of these romantic relationships.”


Julia M. Allen Reviews Ooops…I Just Catharted! Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics by Rupert Kinnard
“Kinnard deploys the most effective and universally available persuasive tool—humor—to topple racist, sexist, and homophobic absurdities.”


Beth Brown Preston Reviews Encounters for the Living and the Dead by Jameela F. Dallis
“The poet introduces us to the organic function of memory and the connection to our past as she both mourns and celebrates our ancestors, grandmothers, cousins, and friends.”


Mandee Loney Reviews Where Shadows Meet by Patrice Caldwell
“This sapphic take on the vampire origin story plays the incredibly important role of centering Black lesbian characters in a genre that often excludes them.”


Sydney Minor Reviews The Lamb by Lucy Rose
“The Lamb is a dark, genre-defying, and thought-provoking novel that will keep you on edge from beginning to end.”


Lindsey Blaser Reviews In Thrall by Jane DeLynn
“Quippy remarks with her friends, an unbreachable wall up with her parents, and new vocabulary flaunted as soon as she learns it, are features that make the protagonist, Lynn, relatable.”


Beth Brown Preston Reviews I Hope This Helps by Samiya Bashir
“Bashir’s work creates, employs, and teaches a restorative poetics, turning her moments of painful experience into triumphs of witness, healing, and change.”


Atlanta Tsiaoukkas Reviews Lesbian Styles in Cinema by Vicki Karaminas and Judith Beyer
“This timely intervention is undoubtedly a boon for the study of lesbian and sapphic identity and style in cinema.”


Mel Oliver Reviews Living at Night by Mariana Romo-Carmona
“This novel is more than fiction—it is a mirror for the generations of women who have labored, loved, and lost in silence. It invites us to imagine what liberation might look like for the caregivers, not just the cared-for.”


Jules Gellert Reviews Lowest Common Denominator by Pirkko Saisio, translated by Mia Spangenberg
“Lowest Common Denominator is written beautifully and fluidly.”


Sydney Minor Reviews Hungerstone by Kat Dunn
“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.”


Allison Quinlan Reviews Queer Communion: Religion in Appalachia edited by Davis Shoulders
“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.”


Jules Gellert Reviews Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth
“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.”


Ash Lev Reviews Be Gay, Do Crime edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley
“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.”


Martha Miller Reviews Daughters of Chaos by Jen Fawkes
“The novel weaves together Greek mythology, Civil War history, sisterhood, fire, sex, and love.”


Lya Hennel Reviews Letters to Forget: Poems by Kelly Caldwell
“I will keep coming back to Letters to Forget, as Kelly’s painfully accurate and relatable words convey and provoke intense feelings.”


Margaret Zanmiller Reviews Mouth: Stories by Puloma Ghosh
“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.”


Ruby Stefanucci Reviews A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell
“Enríquez’s characters live in worlds on the brink of collapse, built on colonialism, sexism, and paranoia. The beauty of the text lies in the unraveling of these forces and the authentic imperfections of her characters.”


Pelaya Arapakis Reviews Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? by Allison Blevins
“Swirling between genres, Blevins weaves a gripping portrait of a marriage that is as devastating as it is tender.”


Beth Brown Preston Reviews The Unboxing of a Black Girl by Angela Shanté
“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.”


Courtney Heidorn Reviews Loving Corrections by adrienne maree brown
“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.’”


Allison Quinlan Reviews To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers edited by Rae Garringer
“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.”


Judith Katz Reviews Reflections in a Rearview Mirror by Teya Schaffer
“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.”


Lucy Soth Reviews Season of Eclipse by Terry Wolverton
“While drawn in by the novel’s suspense and page-turning intrigue, I came away appreciating its quieter and more complex questions of identity and personal fulfillment.”


Allison Quinlan Reviews Swagger: A Celebration of the Butch Experience curated by Rae Theodore and edited by Nat Burns
“Swagger honors the vibrant past of butchness while embracing the ever-evolving diversity of butch identity. . . Every butch joyfully existing is evidence of a queer future.”


Gabe Tejada Reviews The Weird Sister Collection: Writing at the Intersections of Feminism, Literature, and Pop Culture edited by Marisa Crawford
“Lovers of literary magazines will feel at home in the eclectic—yet cohesive—mix of art critique, politically engaged personal narratives, and cultural commentary found in this collection.”


Dot Persica Reviews A Map of My Want by Faylita Hicks
“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.”


Cassidy Hunt Interviews June Thomas
“When I was writing A Place of Our Own, the overarching theme was that people wanted a community center. They wanted a community space for lesbians, but to have one they were usually forced to open a business! So, I think we should move away from this culture of self-sacrifice, women working themselves to the bone.”


Allison Quinlan Reviews Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
“Fried Green Tomatoes gave me a lot of validation during a time when I didn’t get to see much of myself in the world around me. But it reiterates a narrative of whiteness and white saviourism that we cannot and should not ignore.”


Angela Acosta reseña El Círculo Sáfico: Lesbianismo y bisexualidad en el Madrid de principios del siglo XX de Paula Villanueva
“El libro no es una mera reseña bibliográfica, sino un estudio pormenorizado sobre los desafíos personales y profesionales a los que se enfrentaron las mujeres lesbianas y bisexuales.”


Angela Acosta Reviews The Sapphic Circle: Lesbianism and Bisexuality in Madrid at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century by Paula Villanueva
“The book is not merely a literature review, but a detailed study of the personal and professional challenges faced by lesbian and bisexual women.”


Catherine Horowitz Reviews The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies by Maggie Cooper
“It is entrancing to watch each world unfold and discover its inner workings. It was with reluctance that I moved from story to story, wishing I could remain longer in each.”


Judith Katz Reviews Payback by Penny Mickelbury
“The combination of Mickelbury’s skilled storytelling and complex characters makes Payback a rich, fast-moving, feminist adventure.”


Evelyn C. White Reviews Sally! Directed by Deborah Craig
“Aside from Sally Gearhart’s passion for lipstick (“I’ve never been without it,” she quips in the film), the native of rural Virginia routinely defied the norms for women of her generation.”


Pelaya Arapakis Reviews Iridescent Pigeons by Candace Walsh
“These poems 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.”


Laura Gibbs Reviews Old Stranger: Poems by Joan Larkin
“Old Stranger records what it means to sit with the discomforting thought of one’s mortality without flinching.”


Catherine Horowitz Reviews Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens
“Bridget, the protagonist, is a complex character, and for a book with a goal of reimagining the Western genre and bringing new depth to a two-dimensional archetype, that is an achievement.”


Bailey Hosfelt Reviews Wound by Oksana Vasyakina, translated by Elina Alter
“Journeying far distances with an egg-shaped urn and confronting the simultaneously bureaucratic and painful nature of death, the narrator grapples with childhood memories, generational trauma, and her lesbian identity.”


Ruby Stefanucci Reviews Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen
“The collection explores and excavates the intricacies of friendship, lesbian love, relationships, and environmental and sociopolitical crises.”


Pippin Lapish Reviews The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art by Eileen Myles
“Reading Eileen Myles is the experience of discovering language. . . Myles handles words with both reverence and a deeply personal sense of play.”


Allison Quinlan Reviews Country Queers: A Love Letter by Rae Garringer
“The work is stunning visually, with each page showcasing beautiful artwork and photography, but the real heart of the work is the platforming of queer stories. Garringer’s work tenderly immortalizes queer rural lives.”


Courtney Heidorn Reviews Wild Geese by Soula Emmanuel
“Wild Geese grapples with the deep human longing for connection and explores how one can evade loneliness in such a diverse, globalized world.”


Bailey Hosfelt Reviews On Strike Against God by Joanna Russ, edited by Alec Pollak
“On Strike Against God is equal parts rage against the machine and a vulnerable study of the courage necessary to let one’s guard down and come fully alive. This makes it essential, luminescent lesbian fiction for anyone who has articulated and embodied a language they once feared was impossible.”


Chloe Weber Reviews Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, translated by Heather Cleary
“Thirst is an ambitious novel that hits the ground running with gore and chaos and transforms into a profound philosophical lamentation on grief.”


Pelaya Arapakis Reviews Disembark: Stories by Jen Currin
“Currin showcases the breadth and depth of queer relationships—from platonic intimacies to romantic intimacies and the emotional territories in between—exploring the nuances of queer love against the backdrop of urban life.”


Georgie Marsh Interviews Eleanor Medhurst
“Femmes, feminine lesbians, and feminine queer women have always existed, have been really important members of the community, and have been appreciated for the ways that they have dressed and presented themselves. You’re just as queer as anyone else!”


Roberta Arnold Reviews These Letters End in Tears by Musih Tedji Xaviere
“This beautifully written novel is a treatise on culture, politics, and caste wrapped in a love story. Xaviere parses connections between opposites in a way that startles the heart and challenges thought.”


Roberta Arnold Reviews Hotel Impala by Pat Spears
“Hotel Impala teaches us how survival in an impossible system is a constant struggle of grace and grit.”


Martha Miller Reviews Untethered by Shelley Thrasher
“I look for stories about older lesbians because I know there are still a lot of adventures and things left to settle this late in life.”


Sarah Parsons Reviews Beaver Girl by Cassie Premo Steele
“In Beaver Girl, a digestible and compelling dystopian novel, Cassie Premo Steele makes it clear that climate fiction is more present and engaging than ever.”


Sandra Butler Interviews Penelope Starr
“I respect landdykes’ courage to create an alternative culture and to live it fully, both in comfortable collaboration as well as in discomfort and disagreement. They celebrated woman-ness every day by choosing to separate themselves from the patriarchy and aimed to live in harmony with Mother Earth.”


Kelsey McGarry Reviews Nest of Matches by Amie Whittemore
“The collection reads like a sweet walk through both earthly and astral meadows. Whittemore creates a natural world so appealing that it feels like a dreamworld.”


Catherine Horowitz Reviews Still Life by Katherine Packert Burke
“Many books attempt the challenge of authentically capturing what it is to be a young queer person alive in the twenty-first century. It’s a difficult thing to convey, but Burke does it beautifully.”


Kelsey McGarry Reviews Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn
“Anna Dorn both pays homage and gives new life to a classic queer genre, lesbian pulp fiction of the 1950s.”


Mimi Wheatwind and Olivia DelGandio Interview Judith Barrington
“I want to write good stories, but a memoir isn’t just the subject matter. It’s the language, the angle it’s told from, how it’s structured, what the writer makes of it, etc. It’s meant to give the reader pleasure in the reading and also, ideally, a window into a world that’s new to them and hopefully, too, a flash of self-recognition.”


Allison Quinlan Reviews poyums by Len Pennie
“Pennie not only introduces readers to an inside view of survivorship but also introduces many to a vulnerable language, Scots.”


Michaela Hayes Reviews A Bookshop of One’s Own: How a group of women set out to change the world by Jane Cholmeley
“The strength of the book lies in the details. Cholmeley is a self-professed ‘numbers guy’ and, as a result, leads the reader through the nitty gritty of feminist bookselling that might otherwise remain unknown to us.”


Grace Gaynor Reviews Felt in the Jawby Kristen N. Arnett, Sarahlandby Sam Cohen, and Rainbow Rainbow: Storiesby Lydi Conklin
“Retellings, recastings, and refusals support the queer power of these collections.”


Rae Theodore Reviews Still Aliveby LJ Pemberton
“Pemberton’s prose is both lyrical and incisive, capturing the dynamics of love, heartbreak, and obsession. I found myself going back and re-reading sentences to let the words roll around on my tongue a little longer.”


Lya Hennel Reviews Your Dazzling Death: Poemsby Cass Donish
“These poems are at once an ode to queer love, transness, and infinite transformation through the process of grief.”


Lara Mae Simpson Reviews The Italy Letters by Vi Khi Nao
“There is a deep romance running through the novel—inherent in the art of writing letters, of course—and the moments of fondness and longing from across countries and time zones are often touching.”


Bailey Hosfelt Reviews Queer Power Couples: On Love and Possibility by Hannah Murphy Winter, photographed by Billie Winter
“Murphy Winter’s journalistic chops draw out stimulating meditations from the interview subjects on what it means to step outside the confines of heteronormativity, while Winter’s photography provides tender insight into the couples’ lives and loves.”


Sara Youngblood Gregory Reviews The Avian Hourglass by Lindsey Drager
“Rather than focus on the material pursuits of apocalypse—like food or pollution or gathering supplies—Drager is concerned with emotional and linguistic sustenance.”


Courtney Heidorn Reviews The Land is Holy by noam keim
“noam keim crafts lyrical essays, each braided with profound metaphors containing miles of connections across generations and geography.”


Bell Pitkin Reviews Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between by Gemma Rolls-Bentley
“Of the more than two hundred artists included in Queer Art, each has used their creativity to explore their identity, share their unique perspectives, and advocate for their community.”


Margaret Zanmiller Reviews All In: Cancer, Near Death, New Life by Caitlin Breedlove
“Breedlove encourages us to understand the cycles of our lives, be in communion with our ancestors and community, embrace change, and move forward with radical honesty.”


Catherine Horowitz Reviews Private Rites by Julia Armfield
“Private Rites is a thoughtful, moving book that intertwines a personal story with a larger climate catastrophe.”


Dot Persica Reviews How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler
“With each creature, the concepts of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are redefined—each creature is a key unlocking a facet of the human experience.”


Gabe Tejada Reviews Cecilia by K-Ming Chang
“Chang triumphs in how she depicts and weaves together those forces in our lives that live just beyond the tangible.”


Pelaya Arapakis Reviews How It Works Out by Myriam Lacroix
“How It Works Out is an intoxicating and visceral journey filled with queer possibility.”


Iam Monroe Reviews Pariah Directed by Dee Rees
“Pariah is a true rarity in its portrayal of the turbulent, tender, and othering experiences and relationships that characterize coming of age as a young Black stud.”


Marilyn DuHamel Reviews Difficult Beauty: Rambles, Rants and Intimate Conversations by Lauren Crux
“I found myself—sometimes in the course of a single page—chortling, tearing up, raising my eyebrows, putting my hand on my heart, or pausing as I gazed upwards, savoring an unexpected insight.”


Gabe Tejada Reviews Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead by Hayley Singer
“As Abandon Every Hope traverses the boundaries segregating human and animal, presence and absence, life and death, it challenges the ‘immunitary defence(s) against animality’ we’ve used to impose—and justify—our supremacy.”


Sara Ricci Reviews Palimpsest by Courtney Heidorn
“What emerges in Heidorn’s work, in their ‘touching, searching,’ is the inherent need to be discovered, understood, and desired.”


Sandra Butler Reviews Desert Haven by Penelope Starr
“Starr is a lesbian equipped not with theories, hypotheses, or assumptions but with curiosity and admiration for the choices and experiences of the landdykes who come to life on these pages.”


Henri Bensussen Reviews The Velvet Book by Rae Gouirand, Daughter by Maureen Eppstein, and woke up no light: poems by Leila Mottley
“These are poems of resilience and hope that nurture us with life and comfort us even in death.”


Julia M. Allen Reviews We Set the Night on Fire by Martha Shelley and Coming Out, Becoming Ourselves by Lois Johnson and Sarah Boyer with Laura Catanzaro
“Reading these books in tandem, one becomes aware of the linkages between the Daughters of Bilitis and upstart groups such as the Gay Liberation Front and Radicalesbians, linkages that led to increased lesbian activism and visibility.”


Grace Gaynor Reviews Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans
“In her stunning collection, Jasmine Mans utilizes poetry to reveal the intricacies, triumphs, and struggles associated with Black girlhood in a way that Black girls and women deserve.”


Chloe Weber Reviews Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, edited by Carmen Maria Machado
“What modern-day readers should take away from Carmilla is that their lesbianism is not a supernatural curse and that they may live freely and openly rather than live in fear of their identity.”


Judith Barrington Reviews A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces that Shaped Queer Women’s Culture by June Thomas
“The spaces so clearly described in Thomas’s book were places of refuge, places of friendship, and places in which to foment revolution.”


Karen Poppy Reviews The Glass Studio by Sandra Yannone
“Within Yannone’s collection, we find family and patriarchal myths pieced together. The myths, like the stained glass, fused and shimmering, are dangerous and alluring in their creation and perpetuation, but an art form of liberation when we act in their dismantling.”


Gabe Tejada Reviews Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion by Eleanor Medhurst
“Unsuitable weaves a powerful story of a lesbian fashion past that leaves readers hopeful for the future.”


Allison Quinlan Reviews Dragstripping: Poems by Jan Beatty
“Dragstripping is a testament to poetry’s power to excavate the depths of human experience. Beatty’s work invites readers to witness the complexities of identity and resilience after trauma.”


Laura Gibbs Reviews The Burning Key: New & Selected Poems (1973-2023) by Beatrix Gates
“The collection comes to feel like a museum of a life–its artifacts are displayed with precise curatorial care so as to best reflect the visionary wisdom that blazes through even Gates’s shortest poems.”


Dot Persica Reviews Cities of Women by Kathleen B. Jones
“The incessant search for the real truth behind the accepted, dogmatic ‘truth’ defines this book and the queer experience: what are we if not love’s archaeologists, tirelessly digging for proof that we aren’t the first or the only people to have loved the way we love?”


Catherine Horowitz Reviews Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash
“Woven within the twists and turns of the book are the complex discussions of queer identity, sex, love, family, and other more serious topics. Perhaps, most importantly, it is a moving criticism of the American justice system.”


Henri Bensussen Reviews When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes
“When Women Kill was as entertaining and informative as reading a literary, engaging mystery. Like a good mystery, each woman’s story ends with a surprise.”


Roberta Arnold Reviews Blessed Water: A Sister Holiday Mystery by Margot Douaihy
“Douaihy unfurls sentences with life lessons through language that ranges from the sensate to the sublime.”


Julia M. Allen Reviews Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s-1990s by Bettina Aptheker
“In an elegant, seamless fusion of memoir, oral history, and archival research, Bettina Aptheker offers us and future generations the gift of our history.”


Rose Norman Reviews Águila: The Vision, Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Two-Spirit Shaman in the Ozark Mountains by María Cristina Moroles and Lauri Umansky
“Águila is a story of resilience and healing on women’s land. We have few books about women’s land communities. This is an important one.”


Courtney Heidorn Reviews Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall
“There is something for every reader in Jessie Ren Marshall’s short stories: robot girlfriends, sapphic ballerinas, lesbian co-parents, and women flying through space.”


Emily L. Quint Freeman Reviews Jewcy: Jewish Queer Lesbian Feminisms for the Twenty-First Century Edited by Marla Brettschneider
“The umbrella of self can be difficult to navigate. This book offers ideas and stories of Jewish lesbians seeking acceptance rather than marginalization.”


Sarah Horner Interviews Dianna Hunter
“As a young lesbian, I took myself to the land to heal and grow, and at seventy-four, I still look to nature for these gifts. My duty as a writer is to give back, to contribute to the restoration of the earth and to help foster a just and loving human community.”


Courtney Heidorn Reviews Age Brings Them Home to Me by windflower
“windflower uses the perspective from Mother Earth to see everything life offers: family, love, self-actualization, and justice.”


Judith Katz Reviews Grace Period by Elisabeth Nonas
“Nonas has created an affable first-person narrator with Hannah. She spends the bulk of her grieving (and this novel) trying to figure out who she is and what she is meant to do now that Grace is gone.”


Pelaya Arapakis Reviews The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich by Julie Weiss
“The Jolt is a dazzling poetic collection that revels in the majesty and resilience of lesbian love.”


Sisel Gelman Reviews unalone by Jessica Jacobs
“This poetry collection insists there is something powerful and elevated in the spiritual realm, and through study and reflection, we might attain a fraction of it. This fraction will guide and heal us.”


Kali Herbst Minino and Gabe Tejada Review My Withered Legs and Other Essays by Sandra Gail Lambert
“Artfully covering topics of independence, the writing process, aging, and familial and romantic relationships, the collection of essays is about much more than the title suggests—her legs.”


Sarah Parsons Reviews Love the World or Get Killed Trying by Alvina Chamberland
“Readers who enjoy journeys of self-discovery and adventure will find themselves drawn into the wonderful world of Alvina Chamberland.”


Catherine Horowitz Reviews City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter
“It is hard to truly pull off a sweeping epic like this one, but Fruchter’s debut novel is continuously riveting, insightful, and poignant, leaving readers all at once satisfied and curious about what the future holds.”


Henri Bensussen Reviews The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America by Katherine Turk
“Read this fascinating book to learn about the controversies that NOW became known for, how they were settled, the history of the women who directed it, and how they did it.”


Ella Stern Interviews Penny Mickelbury
“We not only want to hear from you, we need to hear from you. Most of us don’t have children and grandchildren. Unless we teach, we have no idea what you all are thinking, or what you’re feeling, or what you’re reading, or what you think about what we write.”


Mikayla Hamilton Interviews Ben Negin (Benadryl) of Boone Barbies
“I am driven to perform because it serves as an outlet for creativity, expression, activism, and emotions.”


Courtney Heidorn Reviews Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volume II by Julie Weiss
“Breath Ablaze is imbued with subtle storytelling, powdered sugar longing, and a thread of timelessness that delivers Weiss’s poems straight to the heart of any sapphic reader, young or old.”


Henri Bensussen Reviews Poor Things Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
“In this film, Emma Stone becomes Bella, portraying so naturally her behavior and emotions that I felt like I was there, pondering the oddness of this child, watching her grow into a young woman.”


Judith Katz Reviews Archangels of Funk by Andrea Hairston
“Archangels of Funk is the most hopeful book about a coming dystopia this reader could ever imagine.”


Courtney Heidorn Reviews American Queers: Poems by Jesse Marvo Diamond
“Jesse Marvo Diamond creates a guiltless queer kingdom of historiography and reclamation.”


Emily L. Quint Freeman Reviews “Nelly & Nadine” Directed by Magnus Gertten
“It was one of those films that stays with you, makes you think, makes you remember, makes you well up with tears.”


Courtney Heidorn Reviews The Weight of Survival by Tina Biello
“The collection is primarily, and poignantly, a love letter to Biello's ancestry, her mother country, and her childhood home of British Columbia.”


Yeva Johnson Reviews Floating Bones by Rae Diamond
“Rae Diamond’s Floating Bones is a magnificent multisensory experience fitting for this hybrid book of poetry, art, and essays. I invite any reader to enjoy it as I did from the first touch to the last page.”


Yeva Johnson Reviews The Price of a Small Hot Fire by E.F. Schraeder
“It was an act of bravery for me to dive into Schraeder’s poetic world without rules, where no topic was off limits. Luckily, my bravery was handsomely rewarded.”


Yeva Johnson Reviews Next Time You Come Home by Lisa Dordal and Milly Dordal
“Next Time You Come Home is a beautiful collection that transforms a mother and daughter’s correspondence into a lyrical tour de force on grief and connection while spotlighting big and tender moments of the last part of the twentieth century.”

"Empowerment comes from ideas."

Gloria Anzaldúa

“And the metaphorical lenses we choose are crucial, having the power to magnify, create better focus, and correct our vision.”
― Charlene Carruthers

"Your silence will not protect you."

Audre Lorde

“It’s revolutionary to connect with love”
— Tourmaline

"Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught."

― Leslie Feinberg

“The problem with the use of language of Revolution without praxis is that it promises to change everything while keeping everything the same. “
— Leila Raven