laura_sackton's reviews
168 reviews

Desire / Halves by Jai Hamid Bashir

What a lush chapbook. It is full of mouths and animals and journeys: across space, through language, and mostly in and out of bodies and what it’s like living inside one. The poems are dense with color, fruit, places, desire. Many of them are infused with a sense of movement and endlessness: the speaker searching for meaning and respite, a place to rest, a way to untangle the threads of living between and among geographies, between and among languages. Roadkill appears several times, as do various religious texts. All of these references give the poems a wonderful heft and density. They feel deeply rooted in the now but they also feel cosmic—a longing and a yearning flung outward from the self, toward the stars. 

I love the way Bashir considers the relationships between the body, speaking, loving, language, and violence. In one poem she writes: “How much / is about the displaced heart? Nothing / speaks without a body.” In another: “The beloved is a sharpness. / The beloved has an arc.” She always returns to mechanics—hands, mouths, tongues, thighs, how we use them—and then she twists these bodily images into stunning, surprising newnesses, like this: “For in grieving, / the mouth is the first part / of the body to die.” 

A few more lines that wowed me: 

“What I want most / is to have multiple limbs. A litany / of different hearts. How much / can I hold?” 

“Metaphor’s raw flesh is shaped / into something unlike any animal. Always, I am / startled by beauty’s lawlessness.” 

I loved this chapbook. Thanks to Nine Syllables Press for sending! 

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes

A startling, striking, original, complicated collection of sonnets, mostly about race in America. These poems are so gorgeously written, and so layered. Line after line took my breath away. They were both technically breathtaking and emotionally raw. There was some playfulness and tenderness in them, also, which helped balance out the intensity. Definitely one of the best poetry collections I've read this year. Highly highly recommend this one. I also think it should go on every high school English class syllabus. I can't think of a more urgent, relevant, beautiful and intricate book with which to study the sonnet.

Vantage by Taneum Bambrick

“We can only save the river with our memory of what the river means.” 

This collection is mostly about the time Bambrick spent working collecting trash along the dams on the Columbia River in rural eastern Washington. It’s gritty and dark, full of bodies, the broken and bloody bodies of animals and people, the living bodies of men. There is an intense recitation of sexism and violence and assumptions and crude jokes and endless misogyny from the men on her garbage crew. But there is also a knowing of these people, a knowing of the small rural places they come from, and the poems don’t make excuses, but they tell truths. It reminded me a lot of Ducks. 

There are some long prose poems, one about sturgeons and another about Bambrick's father, who was a conservationist for Fish and Wildlife, and the complicated relationships between protecting animals and not protecting people. What does it mean to fight for an imperfect place? So much of this book is about the dirty dirty work of maintaining and taking care of the messes humans make and the things humans build. What’s trash and what isn’t?

There's also a lot about the grind of a job, and what jobs do not allow—space for grief and wonderment, how the routine and rhythm of the job can wear you down and mess with what it feels like to be a human. The poems are very still and stark. The language is direct but melancholy.

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

I reread this slowly on audio, and a few things stand out. There’s a whole lot of casual racism, very dated disability politics, Christian morality, and ideas about women that are very ick and do not hold up.

But here's the thing: this book is so queer, and it's so earnest. It's not just that Anne is so earnest, that she loves so completely and feels so deeply. It's not just that she is basically unable to process the world except openly and earnestly. It’s also and more that she can’t shut up about it. She does not stop talking about what she loves, and also what hurts her, and she talks about it all with the same level of intensity and no shame. It is wild how often she declares her love for everything and her heartbreak everything. She uses the most dramatic language she can think of. She goes on and on. She makes everything into a story. It's incredible. It’s so obvious why I loved it so much as a kid, why it resonated so profoundly. I felt exactly like Anne, so in love with everything it felt like it would kill me. 

The queer earnestness! Anne belongs in my thesis on queer earnestness. It’s  so refreshing, this character and this book that does not have a non-earnest bone in it. Love is in fact is dramatic and deserves to be shouted about! The world is so extraordinary, and the only appropriate response, really, is Anne’s response, which is to shout about it constantly and forever. 

The queerness is so obvious to me, too, the way Anne talks about Diana, the way the love each other, how they talk about growing up and living together and never marrying, how they are so devoted to each other, how their love for each other is wild and overflows its container—it’s easy to read as queer but also I think there is something to be said for defining this kind of intense childhood love and friendship as queer. Why not? Anne and Diana's friendship that is central to their lives and identities. They queer what’s supposed to be most important. 

Matthew is also so obviously queer, maybe ace. He talks about how he “never considered courting.” Matthew, Marilla, and Anne all live lives against the norm. Their familial language is queer affection. On this reread, I thought a lot about the kinship between Matthew and Anne, and how it is a kind of queer kinship. They approach the world in opposite ways—Matthew is quiet and solitary; Anne is loud and extroverted—but it’s their sense of wonder that unites them. There are so many languages to love in, and Anne understands Mathew’s language immediately, and he understands hers. Maybe because they both live in a world where people rarely take the time to understand to their languages. 

I also forgot how poignant the part at the end where Matthew dies is, how beautiful and real a description of grief it is. The way Anne wants and needs time to sit with it, to “realize” it, and then afterward how she feels so deeply how the world is still so beautiful even though she’s heartbroken. 

I could also write a lot about Marilla and her own kind of queerness and language of understanding and loving the world. 

Also, Anne has this high femme energy, and also this femme tomboy energy, and also she’s a chaotic bisexual disaster. Gilbert is the token straight character in this book, I will die on this hill.

Pictures Of The Floating World by Amy Lowell

This collection of poetry, published in 1919, contains some of the most wildly erotic lesbian poetry I’ve read this year. It’s split into several sections. The first two, ‘Lacquer: Prints and ‘Chinoiseries’ are, as you can probably guess from the name’s racism, collections of poems styled after both Japanese and Chinese poetic forms. I found these poems drab and strange. What is this white woman doing writing poems about Japanese history? 

I do think it is interesting and worthwhile to read books like this—not to excuse the racism, but because I’ve been thinking about how we use language and what language signifies, no matter where/when/what. There are all sorts of racist terms in this first part of this book, and I don’t think we can say, “well, she wasn’t trying to be racist, so it’s fine.” I also don't think we need to write her off as trash. I don’t think these poems were very good, they did not move me, they seemed like a strange experiment in form, and while there were moments where I could appreciate Lowell’s word choice and rhythm, and while there is a long tradition of using different kinds of forms—why write about emperors and places you’ve never been and history that has no meaning for you? The best poems in this section were ones about nature, that weren’t set in Japan or China and didn’t draw on that history.

The second section, ‘Planes of Personality’ is markedly different. In this, Lowell says in the introduction, are poems “deriving from everywhere and nowhere as is the case with all poetry, and needing no introduction.” It’s interesting that she states this, and I wonder, too, how obvious the blatant love poems were to her audience. There are several sections in this section. She writes about the war, John Keats, art in general, very beautifully about gardens, and in the most stunning part of the book, the part that made my heart beat faster, “Two Speak Together” an incredible sequences of gorgeous lesbian love poems.

These poems are vivid, full of deeply erotic imagery, often of gardens, flowers, and nature. They are blatant, passionate, sometimes wildly dramatic, sometimes softly romantic.

“Why are you not here to overpower me with your 

tense and urgent love?” 

She’s constantly comparing her lover to a garden:

“When I think of you, Beloved,

I see a smooth and stately garden

With parterres of gold and crimson tulips

And bursting lilac leaves.”

She also often compares her love to Venus,and she is constantly pining for her when she’s away, always looking and searching, bemoaning that writing letters is not enough, that she longs to “kneel instantly at your feet.”

There is no mistaking these poems for what they are. It is absurdly obvious that she is writing about a woman, and that this love is sexual and romantic.

“You stand between the cedars and the green sprunces,

Brilliantly naked

And I think:

What are you,

A gem under sunlight?

A poised spear?

A jade cup?”

And do not try to tell me this is not a poem about sex:

The Weather-Cock Points South

I put your leaves aside,

One by one:

The stiff, broad outer leaves;

The smaller ones,

Pleasant to touch, veined with purple;

The glazed inner leaves.

One by one

I parted you from your leaves,

Until you stood up like a white flower

Swaying slightly in the evening wind.

White flower,

Flower of wax, of jade, of unstreaked agate;

Flower with surfaces of ice,

With shadows faintly crimson.

Where in all the garden is there such a flower?

The stars crowd through the lilac leaves

To look at you.

The low moon brightens you with silver.

The bud is more than the calyx.

There is nothing to equal a white bud,

Of no colour, and of all,

Burnished by moonlight,

Thrust upon by a softly-swaying wind.

“Until you stood up like a white flower”? Sex. I found myself getting heated reading this, and I’ve been thinking about why. I mean, there is something beautiful and also hot about this woman who is constantly describing her lover as a plant, who seems to always place her beloved in the garden, in the wild, outside, in these natural places. It feels poignant to me because it denotes queerness as natural, and also because women are so often compared by men to these beautiful things, and there is something rougher and truer about it here. But also, is it simply because it thrills me that this woman from over 100 years ago was writing so blatantly about queer sex?

There is so much domestic ordinary love here too. There’s one poem where the speaker wakes in the night and reaches out to find her lover in the bed, and when she realizes she is alone, she can’t go back to sleep. In another, “A Spring of Rosemary” the speaker writes about how much she loves her lover’s hands doing ordinary everyday things. I love this quiet quiet poem, which is full of Mary Oliver to me:

A Decade

When you came, you were like red wine and honey,

And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.

Now you are like morning bread,

Smooth and pleasant.

I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,

But I am completely nourished.

In another poignant poem, “Penumbra” she imagines her own death, and what it will be like for her lover, alone in the house, with her dogs, the table where she wrote, the furniture she touched, but no longer there to comfort her beloved. Perhaps this is another reason the poems feel so vivid and sexy to me, because even though the lover doesn’t speak back it is very obvious that she’s writing about a long shared life.

The rest of the book is less explicit and covers lots of things. Gardens, of course, but also city streets, visits to bookshops, pets, books, and a sequence of poems about the war and its horrors. I liked it better than the first section but they did not light me up.

I loved reading the edition my library sent to me from 1929, and I loved thinking about this lesbian living her life 100 years ago. The whole book is not exceptional, but the love poems are. It made me think a lot about who we’re writing to and for. Did she imagine I'd be the one reading this? And also what it means to read the past both generously and critically, what it means to try to understand someone both in their context and in our context, when all we have is their words. I enjoyed reading the whole collection, which gave me a sense of the messiness of this person, but the love poems will stay with me.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Just shatteringly incredible. Reading this book was like reading a novel length poem, in the sense that the language was simply incandescent--sentence after breathtaking sentence. But it was also, absolutely, a novel, perfectly structured, full of deeply real characters and intimately evocative of time and place. A masterpiece. I can't wait to read it again.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

I loved this book. This book blew me away. I am not sure I have ever seen a narrative structure quite like this. The use of second person is perhaps the most brilliant use of second person I have ever seen in fiction. The way this story was built simply shattered me. Rarely in fantasy (or any fiction) have I seen such masterful use of craft, such mastery of the architecture of building a story.

It was so beautiful and so engaging and so heartbreaking. This book got my tears and my heart and it was one of those brilliant fantasy novels that breaks open truths about our world, breaks them right open.

A year later, I still think about the remarkable way this book was built (not to mention all of the parallels Jemisin draws to the fucked-up-ness of our world) on an at-least weekly basis.

Quicksand by Nella Larsen

I'm thinking about what it means for a book to be queer. The protagonist of this incredible novel, Helga, is trying to find another way to be. She goes from place to place, sure of herself but unsure of the world, and it’s partly because of her biracial identity, which the world does not like or understand, and it’s also because she doesn’t have any models. She leaves a school she's teaching at because she can’t stand it. She goes to NYC but doesn’t feel at home in Harlem. She goes to Europe and looks for herself there, searching for something different. There is nothing explicitly queer about this book, except for everything. 

The plot is heartbreaking.

Upon returning from Europe, Helga discovers a woman she was close with, whom she had an intense and sometimes antagonistic relationship with, is getting married to her old boss and someone she respects. She has a brief affair with him, realizes she can’t have him, and then has this fit of sudden religion, gets married to a pastor, moves to the South, has kids, and makes herself small. It's so devastating. She’s been striving for so long, trying to build something new without a model, looking for a way to live that isn’t marriage, and suddenly she can’t anymore, she just can't keep trying, and that's where the book ends. She's married, she’s been sick, she wants to leave her situation but she hasn’t figured out how. The book ends with her recovering from sickness and dreaming of finding the freedom she's been looking for her whole life. But not yet, she tells herself, she's not ready. Later. Later, she'll go.

It’s so heartbreaking and so real and so much of it, to me, has to do with trying to fit yourself into boxes that aren’t made for you, and how hard it is do this alone when you aren’t even sure what the freedom you are imagining looks like. For Helga there are so many boxes: she doesn’t want to work in one of the few jobs that is available to her. She doesn’t want to get married. She wants to live a good life, for herself. What does that look like? In so many ways her life is a queer life.

This book reminded me quite a bit of Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid. One thing that is so amazing to me about what Larson does is that she's not really writing about Helga trying to "find herself." Helga knows who she is and what she wants. She is direct, strong, has clear opinions, isn’t taking shit from anyone–and this doesn’t make her happy. It's the world. The world is the problem. There's this amazing tension between her sureness and the world’s blurriness that reminds me of Kincaid–how sometimes the battles feel internal but they are really external.

This is a beautiful, tragic, breathtaking novel about how the world wears people down—Black people, queer people, women. It's about how you can only go on striving for so long. In the context of queerness, to me it feels like this heartbreaking but beautiful explanation of why people assimilate, why people give in to the allure of comfort. Because if you look and look and look and you still can’t find the new thing, how do you build your own way out? Sometimes you can’t.

Nimona by ND Stevenson

1st read:
This novel is full of adventure and science and witty commentary and fascinating magic. But what sets it apart for me is the emotional depth and the complexity of the characters, especially Nimona. It's not a simple book. It asks a lot of big, hard, complicated questions, and offers no easy answers. There's humor, yes, but the themes are actually somewhat dark, and adult, and heartbreaking, and get at the essential question of all truly great fiction: what is it that makes us human?

It's a book that works on two levels. My nephews love it. There's a fantastic, funny, subversive, smart, and fast-paced children's story here. But that's not all it is, and, in my opinion, it shortchanges the brilliance of this novel to pass it off as such. (Not that there is anything wrong with children's lit that isn't also complicated and multi-layered and full of adult themes. There isn't! It's just that this particular book is complicated and multi-layered and full of adult themes.)

2nd read:
Just read this for the second time, and it was just as outrageously good as I remembered. I've always been baffled by all the reviews of this book that focus mostly on its humor. Yes, this book is hysterical. There are a lot of funny parts and the humor is irreverent and sharp and biting and smart and excellent. But the heart of the book is so much more than its humor--it's a story about identity, about what makes us who we are, and who gets to decide.

3rd read (audio):
This is one of my favorite graphic novels ever--it's possibly one of my favorite novel ever, period. I decided I'd try listening to the audio version. I was afraid that the emotional depth wouldn't translate, but it absolutely did. I was blown away. There were actually parts that were hard to listen to, they were so emotional and painful and perfectly done. The depth of character that makes this novel so exceptional--the layers of complexity, all the hard messy things Stevenson has to say about identity--shine through. It's really a testament to the quality of the storytelling (and the actors) that the book translated so well onto audio. I was also worried that the super obvious (but very quiet) queer relationship wouldn't translate, as the art certainly plays a part in telling that story. But it did, too. I highly highly recommend reading the book in this form. The sound effects and creature voices are really well done and the whole thing was just as brilliant and heartbreaking as the print version. I definitely cried.

A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham

When I read this in my early twenties, it was one of those books that stuck right in my heart and didn't let me go. It was a real joy to read it again and love it just as much. I might have even loved it more the second time around. I was more aware of all the layers. What I love about this book is how complex the queer family making is. It's about a family that forms, breaks, and reforms again and again, in various configurations. This book allows a queer family to be as messy and incomplete, as loving and weird, as any other family. And it also hits on a fundamental truth--that when you decide to become family with people, you don't stop being family even when the shape of it changes.