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squidjum's review
5.0
Uh wow that was a lot more resonant than I was expecting and I had to immediately go out and buy a copy and now I will annotate it in pencil and send it to my cross-country bestie. Halp.
jestintzi's review
5.0
I'm admittedly a bit biased, as I was lucky enough to edit the book for Arsenal Pulp. That said, Light has been a favorite poet of mine for a very long time, and this book shows the full breadth of their power. These poems are ferocious, funny, loving, and delightfully gnomic—everything I want in a collection is here, in equal parts. This is a debut collection not to be missed.
the_vegan_bookworm's review
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
5.0
An incredibly beautiful debut poetry collection by a talented writer. The author's queer, autistic and non-binary lived experiences resonated so deeply with me, and I felt so moved that I needed to share a lot of the poems with my loved ones.
Some of my favourite poems were:
Some of my favourite poems were:
- Seven
- Friday nights at the non-binary drive-in
- Someday You'll Love ___ Zachary & Someday I'll Love ___ Zachary
- Feedback loop
- Red oak
- Hi
- Archivists
- To recite each morning
- Transgender dysphoria blues (I'm a huge Laura Jane Grace fan, so this poem made me happy stim!)
Highly recommend to any poetry lovers.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Dysphoria, Transphobia, Deadnaming, Cursing, Sexual content, and Police brutality
Minor: Animal death
hilaryreadsbooks's review
4.0
Poems on queerness and neurodivergence, on knowing the ever-changing self. A. Light Zachary speaks to moments of knowing and unknowing (and the constancy of moving from one to the other)—from the beds of lovers, to performances under a mother’s gaze, to the shadows of expectations unfulfilled / never to be fulfilled, to the refusal of the coyote to be caged. In these poems: to home is to know the home may move, may change, may take a long time to come to be, may be torn down by those who fear the home-builders. And yet, as the speaker says, “every time I build a house, I build it better.” They lean into society’s fear of mutability, face it head-on: “I contain / multitudes. Fear me.”
Some of my favorite poems. “Friday nights at the non-binary drive-in,” where the speaker imagines movies on time travel, on body snatchers, on community that speak to queer experiences. “To recite each morning,” where the speaker shares a tender mantra: “Unmask myself. / Unman myself. / Unname myself. / Unchain myself” and ending simply with “Free myself.”
[Thanks to the publisher for the gifted copy!]
Some of my favorite poems. “Friday nights at the non-binary drive-in,” where the speaker imagines movies on time travel, on body snatchers, on community that speak to queer experiences. “To recite each morning,” where the speaker shares a tender mantra: “Unmask myself. / Unman myself. / Unname myself. / Unchain myself” and ending simply with “Free myself.”
[Thanks to the publisher for the gifted copy!]