laura_sackton's reviews
168 reviews

Ecologia by Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen

This is a rambling and interesting and mundane and sometimes very beautiful collection. The poems are very long, often five or ten or more pages. Even the shorter ones, a page or two, feel long. They all have very long lines, taking up almost the whole page, though it’s a small sized book. It felt very much like a diary to me, broken into poems. Which isn’t a bad thing. Once I got into it I really enjoyed being carried along as Tonnessen wrote about the ins and outs of her life. A lot of it is about the pandemic and lockdown and being lonely. Also a lot about gender and transition and looking back at her old self with tenderness and kindness, thinking about change, how it happens in the body and also in the brain and heart. A lot about different relationships, friends and lovers, and navigating those during covid. 

A long ramble, one thought bleeding into the next. Confessional, personal, deeply intimate and rooted in Tonnessen's own small life. It felt like…a memoir or journal in verse. Like thoughts broken into lines because sometimes it is easier to make sense of them that way. All the poems were connected and talking to each other. A book-length work. It's also maximalist in this very deliberate way, the length of lines and poems, the refusal to withhold detail, the circling of obsessions and memories. 

Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir by Walela Nehanda

This is an intense memoir in verse about Nehanda's experience with cancer as a young nonbinary Black person. It’s powerful and tough. There's all the physical pain and trauma, and there is so much medical racism, and there's also so much interpersonal stuff, abuse from their bio family, complicated feelings about their partner. I really loved these parts, where they speak about how much they love their partner, the love and care they found together, the beauty of Black queer love and the home they built together, and all the really tough parts—ways their partner didn’t support them during cancer, fights they had, ways the relationship turned toxic, ways their cancer changed the relationship. It's a beautiful queer love story but it does not have a happy ending. It’s about how trauma changes you, about dealing with and facing that change and becoming someone new in the process. It honors the love that didn’t remain the same without romanticizing it. 

The audio performance was great and I also loved the nonlinear format, how they jumped around in time, writing poems about their family, falling in love, being in the hospital, ongoing pain, money, gender, dealing with the system, their anger, their hurt, finding pockets of joy with their partner and friends, writing poems, being on the internet—all of this while they were in treatment for cancer, so it’s ongoing and immediate. It doesn't go from Point A to Point B. It's a jumble of: here are some things I felt and dealt with. 

I also thought a lot about memoirs in verse and how I feel different about them than poetry. This poetry did not wow me, it’s statement-forward/straightforward, doesn’t do the language joy I love, but I found this book so moving anyway, and I think part of it is that I want different things from a memoir. I sometimes like memoirs to make sense and tell a story, whereas what I often want from poetry is for it to destroy sense, or at least make things more complicated. I want it to make me feel a certain way. Whereas while I love when memoirs that do that, it does not feel like the core of the form for me. So I was so happy to just experience this journey and hear Nehanda's voice, the anger, love, power, exhaustion and queer joy in their voice. 

Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick

It took me a long time to read this. It’s a meandering book about chronic illness, Hattrick’s life with ME/CFS, as well as their mother’s, and it often goes deep down into the medical weeds. There are long descriptions of studies, various doctors, cult-like cures and other remedies they and their mother have tried. Their writing is somewhat dry and very detailed, with lots of information about the history of these illnesses with unknown causes, and long passages about medical conferences, research protocols, various scandals with various doctors, etc. 

All through this there is also the personal story of Hattrick’s own life, the ways in which their illness has defined their life since childhood, their own ill feelings, what it means and feels like to be a person in the world who is sick, who is ill, who has ill feelings in a world that does not want to look at ill feelings. They write about their closeness with their mother, and how they share the language of illness, about years and years of not being listened to by doctors, of not being taken seriously, about all the ways in which medicine and health care are gendered and therefore people who read or present as female are often ignored. 

There is also this fascinating strand of history, the history of hysteria and other illnesses that have been made up and/or described as social, in the realm of mental health, as having psychological rather than biological causes. And they write about four ill women in particular: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alice James, Virginia Woolf, and Florence Nightingale. I loved these parts the best. They write about how these women experienced illness, the struggles they had to be listened to and taken seriously (especially by the men in their lives), the relationships they had with other women, and their queerness, because they all lived queer lives. 

I loved reading about these women, about their relationships with illness and art and queerness, and thinking about how their lives still affect women and queer people today, how much of what they went through in the late 19th and early 20th century is still happening today—women and queer people being ignored, treated as invisible, having to make up their own remedies, build new structures in which to live sick lives. 

It meanders a lot and was a bit too dense in places for me. Sometimes it felt repetitive. But overall I did really enjoy it, and am glad I read it. In the end, Hattrick talks about covid and long covid and the ways that long covid is similar to ME/CFS, though there isn’t enough research into the latter yet. And they talk about sick time, crip time, the ways in which they are reaching toward an un-cure, how the idea of an un-cure—living their life as disabled and ill and not falling into the ableist cycle of symptom, diagnosis, cure—is freeing and liberating. I really appreciated their thoughts on what it means to move in sick time and how during the early days of the pandemic it felt like the world was coming toward them, starting to move in sick time, even though that has changed since. It gave me a lot to think about in terms of queerness, gender, sickness, non-normative lives, etc.

Stemmy Things by imogen xtian Smith

I loved this collection so much. It is about transness and bodies and being between genders, fucking with gender and playing with bodies, about sex and joy and the earth and growing things and mostly I think it’s about being a human and making poems at the end of the world, which is happening every day. 

There is a lot in it about whiteness. I like the way she does this. It doesn’t feel like a performance, it feels vital, they way she positions herself and reckons with being white and with her ancestors. I think a lot of why this works so well is that this collection is so focused on bodies. What does it mean to have one, if you’re trans and you play with it, and then go out into the world with it? How does it feel, but also why did you do play in the way that you did? What are you doing with your body? How are you using your body? Why did you survive? What does it feel like in your body and what does it feel like to talk about it? 

Her poems about gender and expression and changing bodies and the intersection of knowing your body and identity and dealing with how the world sees you are so good. She complicates it all! There is no one way to be, no pure internal world, no ideal body. We are just here mudding along. 

There are a lot of prose poems and a lot of notes, a lot of nods to music, books, queer ancestors, which makes the collection feels expansive, like part of a long song. One of my favorite poems is a long prose poem that is basically a list of things we have to do, with the rephrase "we're done," as in: “it’s queer utopia or we’re done.” The stakes are so fucking high. 

She makes this work—the stakes—by writing these sweeping poems about empire and violence and gender binaries and movements and then she brings it back to sex, to the body, to dancing, to gardens, stemmy things. The whole book is grounded in material realties even as it grapples with imagining and building and anger and loss and ideas of gender outside of the body. 

I love the long lines, I love all the words like yr and bc, I love how loose and flowing it is. The poems are so vibrant, they are overly full at times. That what it feels like to have a beating heart in this world—overly full all the time. 

It’s like she is trying to find containers in these poems that are big enough for all the stuff she wants to put in them, and she doesn’t quite do it. The notes section often says: there are actually tons more references, these are just the main ones. So the poems are always spilling out and over each other, always reaching and not always arriving. Again, this is what it feels like to make poems and to live, always reaching, making newer and bigger and more beautiful containers and never quite making enough. Never quite getting there, but as she says in one poem, “we cannot be done.” 

Daddy Boy by Emerson Whitney

“An elder is like a map.” 

I loved the structure of this book, a book-length essay, about Whitney’s breakup with their wife and longtime domme partner, their divorce, and the wide empty expanse of what happens next. They decide to go on a storm chasing tour, and the book is kind of a travel diary of the tour through the plains and south. They use what happens on the tour, their interactions with other people, and their reflections on their ongoing obsession with weather, to think about queerness, sex, aging, bodies, family, childhood, moving on, growing up. 

This book is described as a memoir about the end of a relationship, but I think at heart it is about aging and childhood and how hard it is to age in a society that is not built for queer and trans lives. So much of it is about Whitney's tough childhood, having to become very responsible very young, and then falling into this relationship in their early 20s, and having that become their center. It's about how amazing and incredible it felt to be in a D/s relationship, how it was what they wanted and needed, and then how disorienting it was to discover, nine years later, that they no longer wanted it, and to have to go through this reckoning process about how to be an adult. 

I love what they say about markers of adulthood and how we find them—not just queer folks, but also cis folks who hit those presumed markers but haven’t done any interrogation of themselves. They write a lot about this, how from the outside they had this adult life with this woman, they’d hit the marker, and yes it was queer and kinky but even still—marriage, partnership, house, wrote a book. But when their desires change, when they are no longer in love, they realize they never did all the thinking and pondering and grappling to get to adulthood. They just vaulted into the relationship instead. So the book feels like this gorgeous reckoning of: okay, then what do you do? 

This feels so poignant to me because I think this happens to so many people even when we don’t realize it. Because we live in this world that values the markers but not the substance, that values the surfaces of things, and so it’s so easy to just allow yourself to believe you’re an adult when you’ve got the surface thing, when in reality you haven’t hit a marker, an internal marker, that means anything. 

I love the idea that aging is an immense thing that happens and changes everything and starts earlier in some ways than these prescribed ideas about life and timelines allow. So much of this book is about thinking about queer timelines, what they have to offer, where they hurt, and a lot of it is about Whitney wrestling with how their own queer timeline didn’t always serve them. 

There are so beautiful meditations on family, too, and also storms and weather. Whitney reminds me of Eli Clare in some ways, in that he puts down a lot of ideas on the page: observations about their family, dad, ex-wife, gender, body—and just sort of leaves them there. The book feels very unresolved. There’s no pressure to make their life into a legible timeline for the sake of the book. 

At one point Whitney says the problem is with masculine and feminine being tied to gender and not energy. They also talk about hormones as a way to play, and how people should be to play allowed to play, which I loved. I love their playing with gender, their understanding of themself as changing and in flux. It made me think a lot about trans elders. At one point they talk about Miss Major and how she refuses to be narrowed down and pinned down. I’m thinking, too, about Kate Bornstein who also talks about play. There is something really sacred in this trans writing of play, in these trans stories that aren’t about fixed journeys but circular ones, spiral ones. 

Brooms by Jasmine Walls

I loved this! It’s a graphic novel set in 1920s Mississippi, where there is magic, and everyone loves broom racing with magic, but Black people and Indigenous people are not only forbidden from doing magic but also from racing, so there are all these illegal races that take place. The story is about two Indigenous sisters who are at the age when their magic is discovered, and are about to be taken to a residential school. In order to raise money to pay off the gov agents, their cousin gets them a spot on a broom racing team. And the racing team is this beautiful found family of queer and trans BIPOC folks. 

I love how the authors use magic in this—how the racism and segregation that exist in the world are just extended to magic because there happens to be magic. Everything about this novel feels so realistic, like there's nothing magic about it, because the struggles the characters are facing all have to do with keeping each other safe, avoiding being the target of racist laws, trying to get money to survive in a corrupt system, etc. All of their emotional messes come from everything in the real world: the stress of keeping each other safe, the joy of finding each other and building family together.

I love books like this that tell these hard and beautiful stories about the world we live in but do it with a twist. The magic bit was really fun, the broom racing so cool, esp. the illustrations and art for the races, it was just a good time, but that didn’t take away from how serious it all is. 

Just beautifully done. There’s an epilogue and back matter with

newspaper clippings about what happens to all the characters through the 1980s or so, with laws changing, one of them becoming an Olympic broom racer and also using her fame to protest, another one becoming a famous broom maker, etc. And it was so moving to see real history reflected in this alt-history of a US with magic, and it also connected the ongoing struggle, like it was hopeful in that a lot has changed, but also a reminder that so many of these things that the characters in this book faced we are still fighting against today.

A Dead Name That Learned How to Live by Golden

I love the blend of photos and poetry in this. It gives the sense that the book is an ode to and celebration of Golden’s ancestors, that the book is not just poems but something bigger, a collection of all the things that have made them. It gives the book a collaborative feel. There is one poem written from the POV of Golden’s father, about trying as a dad, about how hard it is to be a dad, about what they got wrong and right about his trans kid, that blew me away. 

I did not love this collection as a whole—at times it didn't feel long enough, or it didn't spark my language joy organ. But I'm glad I read it. A few of them poems totally wowed me. There is a series of x/y poems, where on one side are words in plain text and on the other side of the page are bracketed words. These poems are quite beautiful—the words, the ideas, the images, about gender and violence and the assumptions made about bodies, about Blackness and getting free and healing.

I love the expansiveness of how Golden thinks about family, the beauty they write about their relatives with, the deep celebration of Blackness and Black families and Black love and the ways those things held them as a kid. This is a collection about the constellation of love and grief and people who’ve shaped them, and less about what has hurt them as a trans person.

I Don't Want To Be Understood by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Most of these poems are about being trans and the violence exerted on trans people. About the speaker’s estrangement from her family, about the ways that being trans and being true to herself caused this rift that is so painful. There are poems about the fear of going out into the street and how ordinary that fear is, and how chilling that is. Poems about moving through the airport as a trans woman. The poems all feel very matter of fact, deeply rooted in these daily routines of life, the putting on of makeup, the calculations of whether it is safe to be on what street, with a certain person. A lot about how it feels to have survived a world that is not trying to keep you alive. 

The prose poems were my favorite by far. The language in those feels the most exciting, the most exacting. There is one where she talks about how this isn’t a poem, how she isn’t a poem, and about all the things she is, and it becomes more and more fantastical. In another she describes having sex with a woman who isn’t really seeing her, who keeps saying she is so beautiful, who is fetishizing her but also giving her some of what she wants. There are all these incredibly specific moments. There is another one about being searched by TSA and it becomes this wild fantastical story about this trans woman’s genitals being a cosmic blob and causing havoc. These ordinary details and fantastical twists are so compelling.

Villainy by Andrea Abi-Karam

This is wild punk anarchist poetry, most of it is in all caps. I read it in a sitting and it didn't leave me with much. It's a book about fucking up the system and not being who the system wants you to be. It's about declaring yourself outside, about revolutionary radical love outside of colonialism, about fucking shit up and being angry and using that anger to ignite the world. It’s about the kind of care that folks can give each other. A raging song about a radical future. I'm here for this, though the poetry itself, the lines, the words, the form, didn't work so well for me.

I think there’s a lot in it that I missed, and I think there’s a lot in it that is interesting and beautiful. I wonder sometimes if I’m closing myself off to certain kinds of poetry. This is an interesting question to ponder as I write more poetry, as I think about the kinds of poetry I love. I don’t want to stay inside the lines. I don’t want to expect something from poetry books. So it’s interesting for me to think about the times and spaces where I can open up and expand my brain and think, okay, what is this book doing that I’m not seeing? Why is it not making me feel anything? Could I read it differently to find feeling in it, and if not, who is the feeling here for? I'm looking for ways for poetry to make me feel bigger and stranger even when I’m not in love with it. 

Bluff: Poems by Danez Smith

This is an incredible collection. It is about police violence, especially in the Twin Cities during covid, it is about the burning world and living in the burning world. It is about moments of sweetness, it is about climate change and grief and what it means that the world is ending, and mostly, for me, it is about poetry. How can it matter. How it matters. Does it matter. It is. 

Over and over in these poems Smith rejects poetry. They write about how poetry will not save us, how poems are love, are not solutions, are not material. There are so many poems about what they have gotten wrong in poems, how they hide in poems, how instead of doing poems pick up the weapons. Poem after poem reckons with the futility of poems. 

And yet. Poems. A whole book of poems. It’s hard to say what I mean but this is a book that directly confronts the failure of poetry, and goes on making poems anyway. Poetry is alive and it is here and it is fucked and it is beautiful. There's no lesson or moral. Smith does not offer a cohesive philosophy of poetry or living or queerness or Blackness or resistance or joy. Their form, their craft, their heart, the world, poetry itself—is way too big and messy for that. 

This is not an easy or simple book in any way. There are no answers. No one is let off the hook. There is only the trying, the journey, the ongoing. It’s hard to explain how much of an impact this book had on me, the sitting inside this impossible paradox and just saying, okay, here it is. We go on living. 

Absolute brilliance, can’t wait to read it again.