Wild Shrew Literary Review (WSLR) is Sinister Wisdom’s online book review project. To complement the longer list of suggested books available for review, each month we feature a selection of books being released that month. If you would like to write a review, or if you would like to be added to the WSLR email list to receive the monthly complete book list with book descriptions, please email the WSLR editor, Chloe Berger, at chloe at sinisterwisdom dot org.


February 2025 Featured Books:
1. Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World by Sarah Ensor
2. Planeta by Ana Oncina
3. No One's Leaving by Raki Kopernik
4. Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba by M. Myrta Leslie Santana
5. But Not Too Bold by Hache Pueyo
6. All the Parts We Exile by Roza Nozari
7. Fragments of Wasted Devotion by Mia Arias Tsang
8. Ridykeulous Presents: Ridykes Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos by Ridykeulous
9. Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams edited by David Evans Frantz and Amy L. Powell
10. Snapping Beans: Voices of a Black Queer Lesbian South by Jayme N. Canty


Book descriptions:

Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World by Sarah Ensor: What queer modes of resilience and care can teach us about enduring environmental collapse

What does it mean to be at the end of life, the end of a family line, the end of a species, or the end of the future itself? To be “at the last” is often a terrifying prospect, but what would it mean if only the lasting remained? When faced with the abrupt end to the continuities of ecology and nature, environmentalists often limit the conversation by focusing on the ‘future.’ Activists work for the welfare of future generations, while scientists labor over projections of future outcomes. In Queer Lasting, Sarah Ensor asks what this emphasis on the future makes unthinkable. She turns to queer scenes of futurelessness to consider what ecocriticism can learn from queer theory, which imagines and inhabits the immanent ethical possibilities of the present.

Defining queerness as a mode of collective life in which these paradigms of lasting—persisting and ending—are constitutively intertwined, Sarah Ensor turns to two periods of queer extinction for models of care, continuance, and collective action predicated on futurelessness: the 1890s, in which existing forms of erotic affiliation were extinguished through the binary of homo/heterosexuality, and the 1980s spread of the AIDS epidemic, which threatened the total loss of gay lives and specific erotic ways of life. Through readings that trace unexpected formal resonances across the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Allen Barnett, and Samuel Delany, Queer Lasting maintains that queer writing, in its many-shaded intimacy with death, offers us a rich archive to produce new ways of thinking through our environmental cataclysm. Whether confronting the epidemic contours of the AIDS crisis, theorizing the temporary encounters of cruising, or reckoning with the lives of non-reproductive subjects, this book about futurelessness is also a book about persistence. It demonstrates how, far from giving up in the face of the paradigms that environmentalism avoids, queer culture has instead predicated its living—and its lasting—upon them.

Planeta by Ana Oncina: A sci-fi lesbian romance taking place in two possible realities: a cozy little cabin on modern Earth, or the distant planet Nebulon ruled by technological advances far beyond our time. This unique and thought-provoking graphic novel by acclaimed Spanish artist Ana Oncina features a variety of color palettes contrasting between each setting, creating a soft-hued, dreamy atmosphere for this story about searching for one’s place in the world.

Nature-loving loner Valentina lives in a small, cozy cabin in the middle of the forest with her dog Sopa. Every night, she has a dream: she lives isolated on another planet with Ane, her partner. And although everything is too strange, too white and too silent, it seems that Ane and Valentina are made for each other. But is Ane real? To what extent is this alternative reality a dream?

No One's Leaving by Raki Kopernik: A young woman travels through Europe in the late nineties after she learns of her ex-girlfriend's suicide, whose ghost follows her around. She meets an array of people, including a tarot reader, a gay farmer, an expat trans woman, and a French lesbian with a dreamy pit bull. Discovering new love and friendship while remembering the struggles of her past relationship, the story weaves between the narrator's present-day adventures and coming-of-age love, sewn together by existential conversations with the ghost of her ex.

No One’s Leaving is curated to a soundtrack of Gen X music—from Jane's Addiction to The Cranberries to PJ Harvey—and touches on themes of queer love, heartbreak, grief, and mental health.

Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba by M. Myrta Leslie Santana: How drag performance transforms the social landscape of Cuba and illuminates the island’s racial, sexual, and economic inequalities

In Transformismo, M. Myrta Leslie Santana draws on years of embedded research within Cuban trans/queer communities to analyze how transformistas, or drag performers, understand their roles in the social transformation of the island. Once banned and censored in Cuba, drag performance is now a state-sponsored event. Transformismo suggests that these performances make critical interventions in Cuban trans/queer life and politics and in doing so, the volume offers critical insight into how Cuba’s postsocialist reform has exacerbated racial, sexual, and economic inequalities. Leslie Santana argues that mainstream trans/queer nightlife in Cuba is entangled with the island’s tourism economy and has shaped the aesthetics and social makeup of transformismo in coastal Havana, which largely caters to foreigners. Leslie Santana considers how Black lesbian and transgender transformistas are expanding understandings of sexual selfhood and politics on the island, particularly questioning the ways that Black women’s creativity is prominently featured in the aesthetics of tourism and trans/queer nightlife, while Black women themselves are denied social and material capital.

But Not Too Bold by Hache Pueyo: The Shape of Water meets Mexican Gothic in this sapphic monster romance novella wrapped in gothic fantasy trappings

The old keeper of the keys is dead, and the creature who ate her is the volatile Lady of the Capricious House⁠—Anatema, an enormous humanoid spider with a taste for laudanum and human brides.

Dália, the old keeper’s protégée, must take up her duties, locking and unlocking the little drawers in which Anatema keeps her memories. And if she can unravel the crime that led to her predecessor's execution, Dália might just be able to survive long enough to grow into her new role.

But there’s a gaping hole in Dália’s plan that she refuses to see: Anatema cannot resist a beautiful woman, and she eventually devours every single bride that crosses her path.

All the Parts We Exile by Roza Nozari: From a queer Muslim woman and artist, a generous, insightful memoir that traces her journey toward radical self-acceptance and of exile from her ancestral home.

As the youngest of three daughters, and the only one born in Canada soon after her parents’ emigration from Iran, Roza Nozari began her life hungry for a sense of belonging. From her early years, she shared a passion for Iranian cuisine with her mother and craved stories of their ancestral home. Eventually they visited and she fell in love with its sights and smells, and with the warm embrace of their extended family. Yet Roza sensed something was amiss with her mother’s happy, well-rehearsed story of their original departure.   

As Roza grew older, this longing for home transformed into a desire for inner understanding and liberation. She was lit up by the feminist texts in her women’s studies courses, and shared radical ideas with her mother—who in turn shared more of her past, from protesting for the Islamic revolution to her ambivalence about getting married. In this memoir, Roza braids the narrative of her mother’s life together with her own on-going story of self, as she arrives at, then rejects, her queer identity, eventually finds belonging in queer spaces and within queer Iranian histories, and learns the truth about her family’s move to Canada.

All the Parts We Exile is a memoir of dualities: mother and daughter, home and away, shame and self-acceptance, conflict and peace, love and pain—and the stories that exist within and between them. In sharp, emotionally honest and funny prose, Roza tenderly explores the grief around the parts we exile and the joy of those we hold close in order to be true to our deepest selves.

Fragments of Wasted Devotion by Mia Arias Tsang: “Your world never ends how you think it will.”

In this dazzling debut collection, Mia Arias Tsang explores the complexity and torture of queer heartbreak with an urgency that will leave you gasping. Flash nonfiction, fragmented vignettes and personal narrative combine to tell the almost-love stories of her young adulthood. From dusty university libraries to Boston-bound BoltBuses, and the icy grief of Somerville to the smoggy shores of Venice Beach, Fragments of Wasted Devotion spans a country of desire, a galaxy of yearning, and seven years of failing, losing, and finding oneself in love. Featuring original illustrations by Levi Wells.

Ridykeulous Presents: Ridykes Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos by Ridykeulous: The first exhibition catalogue of the acclaimed queer, feminist curatorial initiative Ridykeulous, marking the occasion of their first institutional presentation in Europe at Nottingham Contemporary.

Founded in 2005, Ridykeulous mounts exhibitions and events primarily concerned with queer and feminist art. This publication will be the first exhibition catalogue by Ridykeulous, joined by Sam Roeck, and will accompany the fall 2023 exhibition Ridykes' Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos at Nottingham Contemporary. With newly commissioned texts by curator Lia Gangitano and Alexandro Segade of the artist collective My Barbarian, the catalogue will be complemented by a conversation between Ridykeulous members Nicole Eisenman, A.L. Steiner and Sam Roeck, providing insights into the collective's thinking, politics, behind-the-scenes notations, and methods of exploration, as well as an introduction by Nottingham Contemporary's Chief Curator Nicole Yip.

Using humor to critique the art world and heteropatriarchal culture at-large, Ridykeulous often reinvents language to reflect their sensibilities and concerns—composing communiqués, screeds, and diatribes across various media. The exhibition features an intergenerational mix of 30 contemporary visual artists working across film, video installation, sculpture, and performance. Playfully proposing queer fabulosity as a critical intervention in the capitalist spectacle, the exhibition seeks to erode the secondary positioning of LGBTQ+ art and artists as “alternative.” Designed by the Zürich-based Studio Marie Lusa, the publication will evoke the textual feeling of a zine, with over 100 full-color and black-and-white image plates.

Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams edited by David Evans Frantz and Amy L. Powell: Accompanying the first retrospective exhibition showcasing three decades of Millie Wilson’s work, this publication delves into the influential, yet underrecognized, artist and pedagogue who taught generations of artists at the California Institute of the Arts and whose work has deftly examined feminism, queerness, and the historical erasure of such positions from institutions of art.

Uniting major loans from museums, private collections, and the artist, the project contextualizes Wilson’s substantial work, influential pedagogy, and legacy. Alongside her peers such as Lutz Bacher, Nayland Blake, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Lorna Simpson, Wilson joined 1980s postmodernism with the personally and politically charged conceptualism of the 1990s. Her work reflects a particularly unruly conception of queerness that emerged in California during these decades. Featuring newly commissioned scholarly essays by curator David Evans Frantz and scholar Jill H. Casid; a conversation among artists who studied with Wilson; and extensive new photographic documentation of Wilson’s work, the catalogue explores Wilson’s consistent appropriation of museum display practices and institutional authority, her art historical references to dada and surrealism, her sharp attention to gendered portrayals of sexual deviance in early twentieth-century psychoanalysis and sexology, and her longstanding interest in bodies as contested sites.

Snapping Beans: Voices of a Black Queer Lesbian South by Jayme N. Canty: Explores the role of the South in Black queer lesbian experiences of hurting and healing

Snapping Beans offers a collective narrative of Southern queer lesbian women and gender-nonconforming persons. Throughout the text, the American South acts as both a region and a main character, one that can shame and condemn but also serve as a site of reconciliation. Blending autoethnography and oral histories, Jayme N. Canty explores how both geographic location and social spaces, such as the Church, intersect with categories such as race, gender, and sexuality to shape and mark identity. Just as the intergenerational practice of snapping beans provides an opportunity to slow down, Canty enables readers to make space and to hear a new Southern narrative. Filled with both hurt and healing, Snapping Beans chronicles a multivocal journey of coming out, ultimately revealing a South where Black queer lesbians not only live but also, more importantly, thrive.