bisexualbookshelf's reviews
697 reviews

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

informative reflective slow-paced

4.75

"Right-wing nationalism is bourgeois nationalism, and in our struggles against capitalist austerity we must emphasize that our enemy arrives in a limousine and not on a boat."

Harsha Walia’s Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism is a searing indictment of how borders aren’t just lines on a map but weapons of capitalist and racial domination. Walia dismantles the myth that migration is a crisis needing management—what we’re really witnessing is a crisis of displacement, driven by imperial wars, neoliberal extraction, and climate devastation, all orchestrated by the very states that claim to offer refuge. With unflinching clarity, she exposes how borders don’t just keep people out; they uphold global apartheid, divide the working class, and consolidate ruling-class power.

One of the book’s most urgent takeaways is how white supremacy has shaped immigration laws to maintain its stranglehold on power. As Walia makes clear, “illegal” migration only exists because the state criminalizes movement while ensuring that racialized migrants remain hyper-exploitable. She also hones in on US border imperialism’s direct harm to Indigenous nations within occupied territories—this land was never the US government’s to police in the first place. The book expertly weaves together how border control is inseparable from state violence, linking militarized immigration enforcement to the War on Drugs, free trade agreements like NAFTA, and the forced displacement they create.

As someone who grew up in post-9/11 America, Walia’s discussion of the War on Terror hit especially hard. I’ve watched Islamophobia, surveillance, and mass deportations become routine, and Border and Rule makes it impossible to ignore how US border policies are part of a much larger global system of oppression. From the US-Mexico border to Fortress Europe to the violent policing of Palestinians, Rohingya Muslims, and caste-oppressed groups in India, Walia connects the dots with a precision that left me enraged, inspired, and even more committed to border abolition.

📖 Read this if you love: anti-imperialist analysis, radical frameworks for solidarity, and the works of Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

🔑 Key Themes: Imperialism and Displacement, Capitalism and Migrant Labor Exploitation, State Violence and Surveillance, Border Abolition.

Content Warnings

Like a Hammer: Poets on Mass Incarceration by Diana Marie Delgado

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dark informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.25

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be released in the US on March 4th, 2025 by Haymarket Books.

In Like a Hammer: Poets on Mass Incarceration, editor Diana Marie Delgado gathers a compelling collection of poetry that unmasks the painful truths of the U.S. prison-industrial complex, demanding the reader confront the inescapable grip it has on both bodies and minds. These poems are birthed from the voices of the incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and those who love them, each one a testament to the human cost of carcerality. With stark imagery and layered metaphor, the poets refuse to accept the notion that incarceration is an inevitable force, choosing instead to depict it as a monstrous system fueled by colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism’s demand for control.

The collection is a vivid portrayal of the suffocating nature of imprisonment, where time becomes a stagnant, oppressive force and where families are torn apart, their bonds stretched thin by the miles and glass that separate them. The poets also offer an incisive critique of the systems that push individuals toward crime, exposing the links between poverty, addiction, and state-sanctioned violence. Themes of guilt, survival, and resilience pulse through the pages, as these voices reflect on the dehumanization inherent in both punishment and policing. The body, as both a site of resistance and suffering, is explored with tenderness and urgency, especially through the lens of the feminist experience within the prison system.

One of the most striking elements of Like a Hammer is the experimental form of many poems. Poems like Sin à Tes Souhaits' "TRAP," which interrogates the devastating consequences of racism through multiple definitions of "trap," and Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's "Architect 1," which traces the birth of carcerality back to European colonialism, provide sharp political critique while maintaining deep emotional resonance. Meanwhile, Candace Williams' "black, body" and Nicole Sealey's "An excerpt from ‘Notes from the Visitations’" challenge the dehumanizing structures of policing and the ways they disproportionately affect Black and brown bodies.

Ultimately, Like a Hammer is not just a collection of poems; it is a call to imagine a world beyond prisons, one where justice is not synonymous with suffering. Through these poems, we are asked to witness the pain, but also the resilience, of those who have been brutalized by the system—and in doing so, to demand a future without cages.

📖 Recommended For: Fans of radical poetry, abolitionist thought, and the intersections of personal testimony and political critique; readers interested in the impacts of carcerality on individuals and families; those interested in abolition of police and prisons.

🔑 Key Themes: Mass Incarceration, Dehumanization, Family Separation, Historical and Systemic Roots of Oppression, Feminist Perspectives on Prison, Resistance and Re-imagining Justice.

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Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

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challenging dark emotional reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be released in the US on March 18th, 2025 by Hogarth Press.

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa is a poignant and darkly humorous exploration of disability, autonomy, and the complexities of living in a body that doesn’t conform to “normal” standards. Through the eyes of the narrator, Shaka, the story unfolds in the confines of a group home she owns after inheriting it from her deceased parents. Shaka suffers from myotubular myopathy, a degenerative muscle disorder that leaves her physically and socially isolated, relying on a ventilator to breathe and mobility aids to navigate her life. This novella is an unflinching portrayal of Shaka’s frustration with a world that continuously infantilizes her, expecting nothing from her because of her disability and gender.

Ichikawa’s writing is a blend of biting wit and deep emotional insight. The humor is self-deprecating, often sharp and cynical as Shaka observes the absurdity of her existence. The prose is introspective, never shying away from the raw truths of Shaka’s situation. She yearns for experiences that so many others take for granted—like the simple act of reading a book without pain—yet struggles against the physical limitations her body imposes. Her longing for normalcy evolves into an obsession with reproductive autonomy, particularly the choice to experience an abortion. This fixation serves as a lens through which the book delves into the intersections of disability and reproductive justice, forcing us to confront the often-overlooked realities of disabled people’s rights over their own bodies.

At its heart, Hunchback is a meditation on identity and autonomy. Shaka’s internal battle is one of dignity—how to maintain it in a world that expects you to be less than human, a body that isn’t meant to be sexual, capable, or independent. The narrative questions what it means to truly have a choice when the world has already decided that your body is incapable of making its own decisions. Through Shaka’s voice, Ichikawa gives us a character who is defiant and vulnerable in equal measure, desperate to reclaim agency over a life that constantly denies her that power. It's a powerful, necessary book, one that demands we reconsider how we view disability and autonomy in a society that often relegates the disabled to the margins.

📖 Recommended For: Fans of introspective literary fiction, disability justice narratives, and darkly humorous, character-driven stories; readers interested in the intersections of gender, disability, and reproductive justice; those who appreciate sharp, self-aware protagonists and biting commentary on social norms.

🔑 Key Themes: Autonomy and Agency, Disability and Isolation, Reproductive Justice, Gender and Disability, Identity and Dignity.

Content Warnings

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

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mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

There is something deeply unsettling about I Who Have Never Known Men, a novel that unfolds with a quiet, eerie inevitability. Harpman strips her dystopian world of ornamentation, presenting a stark and enigmatic narrative that lingers in the mind long after the last page. This is not a book of grand revelations or traditional climaxes, but one of slow, existential unraveling.

The story follows a group of women confined to a bunker, watched over by silent, unreadable guards. Their lives before captivity are fragmented memories, half-remembered glimpses of a world that once made sense. But at the novel’s center is a narrator who stands apart from them all—a woman who was a child when she arrived in the bunker, never given a name, and never quite belonging. She observes the rigid structures the other women cling to, questioning their hierarchies and the ways they attempt to impose order onto their unknowable fate. To her, time is an abstraction, rules are arbitrary, and the world beyond the bunker is a mystery she cannot stop yearning to solve.

When an unexpected event allows the women to escape, the novel shifts, yet the unease remains. The outside world is barren, stripped of life and history. With no landmarks to anchor them, the women wander, seeking answers that never come. Their survival is a testament to resilience, but also to the futility of hope in a world that refuses to offer meaning. The narrator, insatiably curious, refuses to accept the constraints imposed on her—not in the bunker, and not in the fragile community the women attempt to build. Her defiance is quiet but absolute: “No, this country belongs to me. I will be its sole owner and everything here will be mine.”

What makes I Who Have Never Known Men so haunting is its refusal to provide certainty. Are they still on Earth? Why were they imprisoned? Who were their captors? The narrator never learns the answers, and neither do we. Instead, the novel lingers on the question of what it means to be human when history, memory, and even companionship begin to erode. Harpman’s prose is sparse yet lyrical, its detachment mirroring the narrator’s own alienation. There are no grand emotional revelations, no cathartic resolutions—only the relentless forward motion of life, and the eventual certainty of death.

This is a novel that defies easy classification. It is dystopian, yet deeply philosophical; speculative, yet achingly human. It is a meditation on isolation, grief, and the fragility of identity. And in the end, it leaves us with the same unsettling uncertainty that defines its narrator’s existence. After all, what does it mean to survive if survival is all there is?

📖 Recommended For: Admirers of introspective dystopian fiction, existential meditations on isolation and survival, and minimalist yet haunting prose; readers drawn to stories that explore humanity’s fragility and resilience; fans of Octavia Butler and Yoko Ogawa.

🔑 Key Themes: Isolation and Identity, Memory and Erasure, Autonomy and Captivity, The Search for Meaning, Survival vs. True Existence.

Content Warnings

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Díaz

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emotional inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.5

Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem is a collection that aches and pulses, alive with longing, grief, and defiance. It is a book that moves like water—eroding, sustaining, and shape-shifting—demanding that readers sit with the contradictions of survival and desire. Diaz’s poems weave together the personal and the political, exploring the aftermath of colonial violence on Indigenous communities while fiercely reclaiming love, body, and language. The result is a collection that is both a love song and an act of resistance, refusing to let Indigenous bodies be reduced to relics or statistics.

The relationship between body and land is central to this collection, often blurring into one entity. In Mojave thinking, Diaz reminds us, the words for body and land are almost identical, making their destruction indistinguishable. Her poetry renders the wounds of colonialism tactile—rain, blood, rivers, and cracked earth appear as motifs, reinforcing the deep connections between identity, environment, and historical trauma. Yet, amid the loss, there is also an insistence on pleasure, on the sacredness of touch. The body, often framed as a site of violence in colonial history, is here rewritten as a site of love, agency, and transformation.

Diaz’s language is breathtaking—both sparse and lush, sharp yet fluid. Her poetry moves between declarative, fragmented lines and sweeping, lyrical imagery, creating a rhythm that mimics the contradictions she navigates. She layers striking metaphors—maps as ghosts, America as a clot of clouds, a lover’s body as a lake-glint—crafting a landscape that is both haunted and radiant. The tension between visibility and erasure runs through these poems: the weight of existing in a country that seeks to erase Indigenous presence while simultaneously consuming its image.

Postcolonial Love Poem does not offer easy resolutions. Instead, it carves space for survival as an act of creation, for love as both a reckoning and a refuge. Diaz challenges the reader to hold grief and joy in the same breath, to witness history without turning away, and to recognize that language itself can be an act of reclamation. This collection is a masterwork of lyricism and defiance—a necessary read for those willing to step into its river and be changed by the current.

📖 Recommended For: Readers who appreciate lyrical, visceral poetry exploring colonialism, desire, and survival; those drawn to works that intertwine body, land, and language; fans of Ocean Vuong.

🔑 Key Themes: Erasure and Survival, Love and Intimacy, The Body as Landscape, Indigenous Identity and Resistance, Water and Transformation.

Content Warnings

Waiting for the Long Night Moon: Stories by Amanda Peters

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challenging reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.5

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book was published on February 11th, 2025 by Catapult.

Amanda Peters’ debut short story collection, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, is a quiet meditation on grief, resilience, and the enduring bond between Indigenous people and the land. Through spare yet lyrical prose, Peters captures the weight of intergenerational trauma while insisting on the vitality of survival—a delicate balance between sorrow and defiance.

Each story in the collection offers a window into the complex realities of Indigenous life across time and place. In one, a grieving mother finds purpose as a water protector, her fight against state violence becoming an act of remembrance for her daughter. In another, an Indigenous family shelters their white French trading partners from English invaders, driven by a hard-earned empathy born from their own experiences of displacement. The titular story reflects on the lasting wounds of settler colonialism, as an Indigenous man reckons with how white settlers irrevocably altered his life. Time and again, Peters highlights the violent legacies of residential schools, the theft of language, and the slow, deliberate erasure of Indigenous identity. Yet, these stories are not defined solely by loss; the land itself emerges as a character, offering its own quiet promise of healing. Trees, rivers, and mud are not merely backdrops—they are witnesses, collaborators, and lifelines.

While Peters' storytelling is rooted in dignity and truth, I found myself longing for a stronger emotional connection to the characters. Though the writing is undeniably beautiful, the brevity of certain stories and the broad sweep across historical periods sometimes left me feeling unmoored. The collection's structure made it difficult to find a reading rhythm, and I finished the book admiring its themes more than remembering its people. This left me with a sense of respect, but not quite love.

That said, Waiting for the Long Night Moon is a valuable contribution to contemporary Indigenous literature. Peters reminds us that survival is resistance, and that memory—held in the soil, in language, in the body—is its own form of power. For readers seeking stories of resilience told with gentle lyricism and deep reverence for the earth, this collection offers a quiet but necessary voice.

📖 Recommended For: Readers drawn to lyrical, land-centered storytelling; those interested in Indigenous resistance, intergenerational trauma, and the resilience of community.

🔑 Key Themes: Land and Belonging, Grief and Resilience, Colonial Violence and Erasure, Memory as Resistance, Survival as Defiance.

Content Warnings

When the Harvest Comes by Denne Michele Norris

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challenging emotional reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US by Random House on April 15, 2025.

Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes is a novel that aches with tenderness, loss, and the quiet resilience of becoming. It is a story of love—romantic, familial, and self—braided with the jagged edges of trauma and the suffocating expectations of Black masculinity. Through Davis, a Juilliard-trained violist navigating the eve of his wedding to his white fiancé Everett, Norris crafts an intimate portrait of a person searching for beauty and safety in a world that has too often denied both.

Davis’s life is a study in dualities—grace and violence, yearning and restraint, visibility and concealment. Music is his sanctuary, but it cannot shield him from the specter of his father, The Reverend, whose rigid notions of manhood and simmering alcoholism once fractured their family. The novel’s structure, winding between past and present, reflects Davis’s own internal looping—his longing to escape his origins and his inability to fully sever those roots. Norris withholds the specifics of Davis’s estrangement from his father until the novel’s close, a revelation that is devastating yet familiar: the brutality that often meets Black queer softness.

Davis’s fixation on beauty—his clean-shaven face, the femme jumpsuit he wears to his wedding—is not mere vanity but survival, an armor against a world that punishes difference. Yet, even in his relationship with Everett, which offers stability and acceptance, there are undercurrents of power. Everett’s whiteness, his family’s strained liberal tolerance, and his own role as the “masculine” partner subtly reinforce Davis’s vulnerability. The novel’s exploration of desire is thus inseparable from race, class, and gender—a sharp critique that cuts as deeply as it heals.

When Davis ultimately recognizes her transness and chooses the name Vivienne, a gift from her father’s final letter, it is both a rebirth and a reckoning. The Reverend’s flawed love, his need for a son, had been suffocating—but it had also held, however imperfectly, an aching awareness of who Davis truly was. The novel’s final act is not neat closure but a tender step toward wholeness.

If I had any reservations, it was that certain subplots—like Olivia’s abortion—felt underdeveloped, disrupting the novel’s otherwise fluid emotional arc. Yet, this is a minor flaw in a book that left me raw and breathless. Vivienne is a character I will carry with me—a reminder that survival is its own form of grace, and sometimes, becoming ourselves is the most radical act of love.

📖 Recommended For: Readers drawn to emotionally rich literary fiction exploring Black queer and trans identities; those who appreciatt character-driven stories about familial trauma and healing; fans of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong and Bellies by Nicola Dinan.

🔑 Key Themes: Race and Masculinity, Gender Identity and Self-Discovery, Familial Expectations and Inheritance, Queerness and Intimacy, Beauty as Survival.

Content Warnings

A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton

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adventurous emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US by Soho Press on April 1, 2025.

Jeanne Thornton’s A/S/L is a deeply evocative novel that pulses with the ache of queer longing, the glitchy hum of '90s internet culture, and the fractured beauty of trans survival. Spanning both 1998 and 2016, the book traces the lives of Abraxa, Sash, and Lilith—once gender-questioning teens crafting a video game called Saga of the Sorceress in an online chatroom, now estranged trans women navigating the messy terrain of adulthood.

Thornton’s prose captures the jagged edges of trans becoming: at times dreamy and poetic, other times raw and disjointed, reflecting the precarity of forging an identity under systems designed to erase you. The book hums with the tension between fantasy and reality—between the worlds we build to survive and the ones that threaten to break us. The teens’ game-building is rendered with reverence, positioning video games as queer art forms—portals into self-determination, into worlds where bodies and identities are mutable, magic. This creative defiance carries into adulthood, where the characters remain tethered to their shared past, still reaching for that elusive sense of home.

Abraxa is a tempest of restless movement and fierce imagination, clinging to the belief that Saga of the Sorceress was something more than a game—that it was, and still is, real. Lilith, burdened by the Boy Scout creeds of loyalty and self-discipline, seeks safety in cisnormative approval yet yearns for something wilder. Sash, craving connection, funnels her emotions into storytelling and financial domination, grasping for intimacy in commodified spaces. Each woman aches to be seen—not as a symbol or spectacle, but as a person worthy of love, creation, and survival.

If the novel stumbles, it’s in its pacing; certain chapters drag, and the structure occasionally feels unwieldy. But the emotional core remains potent. Thornton refuses tidy resolutions—because trans lives are not tidy. Instead, she offers something more radical: the possibility of rebuilding, together.

📖 Recommended For: Lovers of introspective trans fiction, stories exploring online communities and digital subcultures, and readers drawn to narratives about queer friendship and creative world-building; anyone nostalgic for late '90s internet culture or interested in the intersections of gender, technology, and art; and fans of Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas.

🔑 Key Themes: Trans Identity and Becoming, Queer Community and Longing, Creativity as Survival, Digital Worlds and Self-Determination, Power and Vulnerability in Relationships.

Content Warnings

Scream / Queen: Poems by C. D. ESKILSON

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challenging emotional reflective fast-paced

4.5

Thank you so much to the author for the gifted eARC! This collection will be published in the US on March 22, 2025 by Acre Books.

C.D. Eskilson’s Scream / Queen is a razor-edged, defiant debut—a collection that howls into the night and reclaims the monstrous with teeth bared and lipstick immaculate. Blending the guttural aesthetics of horror cinema with the raw vulnerability of trans survival, Eskilson crafts poems that stalk the liminal spaces between fear and power, inheritance and resistance. Through the haunted echoes of films like Halloween, The VVitch, and Alien, the collection interrogates the violence inflicted upon trans bodies—both by the world and by the legacies etched into their bloodlines—while insisting on the ecstatic, radical potential of living anyway.

The poems pulse with a language that is at once jagged and lyrical, a body made of barbed wire and open wounds, but also shimmering possibility. Eskilson’s voice twists between fragmentation and fluidity, refusing easy containment. In “On Witchcraft,” gender is an incantation—a spell to summon multiplicity, to carve out space for bodies deemed impossible. “Confession from Medusa’s Head” electrified me with its refusal to apologize, giving voice to a survivor’s anger that is both sharp and righteous. “Intro to Film Theory” bristles against transphobia, unmasking the grotesque scripts imposed upon trans lives, while “Prey: A Gloss” grieves the horror genre’s long history of aligning queerness with monstrosity—then dares to reclaim that monstrosity as strength. And “My Roommate Buffalo Bill” gutted me entirely, transforming a site of transphobic cinematic violence into a space of solidarity and strange, necessary kinship.

Threaded through every piece is the specter of self-destruction—generations of mental illness pressing down like a curse—but also the tender, aching work of refusing to be devoured by it. The speaker claws their way toward a future beyond inherited ruin, rejecting the urge to shrink themselves to fit the world’s cruel gaze. There is rage here, yes, but also a longing to hold a self fully—to stretch, to roar, to coven with others who understand. Ultimately, Scream / Queen insists that the trans body, like any good final girl, is not just something to be feared or pitied—it is something that survives. Something that loves. Something that might, in the moonlight, look a little monstrous—and that is its power.

📖 Recommended For: Readers who crave visceral, genre-bending poetry; lovers of trans-centered narratives and horror media reinterpretations; those drawn to works exploring trauma, survivorhood, and self-reclamation; fans of Franny Choi and torrin a. greathouse.

🔑 Key Themes: Transness and Monstrosity, Intergenerational Trauma and Mental Illness, Gender and Body Autonomy, Survivor Anger and Healing, Queer Kinship and Resistance.

Content Warnings

On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe by Jamieson Webster

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 20%.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be released by Catapult on March 11, 2025 in the US.

I stopped reading On Breathing at around 20% because it simply wasn’t aligning with what I was looking for. As someone who’s deeply engaged in liberatory politics and interested in the intersection between radical political thought and psychoanalysis, I was hoping for a more critical exploration of how environmental catastrophe and care intersect with broader social and political systems. Instead, I found the book leaning heavily into personal, introspective reflections—from the author’s own struggles with asthma and her experiences as a psychoanalyst during COVID, to extended meditations on her infant daughter’s breathing.

This focus felt both off-target and, frankly, borderline problematic for me. I’m uncomfortable with literature that exploits a child’s narrative without the possibility of consent, and I wasn’t drawn to the reliance on older psychoanalytic ideas, especially those rooted in Freudian and Winnicottian thought, which I find outdated and unconvincing. Overall, I was bored, sometimes confused, and increasingly convinced that my time would be better spent on texts that not only engage my interests but also contribute to my personal and political growth.

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bisexualbookshelf's reviews 697 reviews

bisexualbookshelf's reviews
697 reviews