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laura_sackton's reviews
168 reviews
Love the World Or Get Killed Trying by Alvina Chamberland
This was…something. A lot. I started it in March, set it aside, then restarted it. I loved the first 80 or so pages. The voice of this trans woman on the edge of her 30th birthday, traveling around, talking shit, talking about all of her woes and all the shit she deals with, being super honest and upfront and angry and snarky, going on and on about her obsessions, her thoughts about queer and trans culture, her thoughts and feelings about dating as a trans woman, all her thoughts about men and sex and transphobia…like, I was so into it. She is so funny, so brash, she tells it like it is, the book is full of ALL CAPS and asides and weird little stories and all these tangents into her obsessions, books she loves, crushes, etc. The book is weird, totally singular, there isn’t really a plot, it’s just being inside this woman’s mind as she writes and talks.
I couldn’t really stay with it for 250 pages, but I think this was more to do with my mood when I was reading it than the book. It’s a trip, totally unique, voicey and wild.
Pretty: A Memoir by KB Brookins
In a lot of ways it is a very straightforward memoir of trans coming of age. Brookins writes about their girlhood, their fraught relationship with their parents, the ways masculinity was taught to them, the ways they took on butch identity in their teens and 20s, and the toxic masculine traits they learned/adopted when they were assembling their butch identity. They write about all the struggles they’ve had to be a Black transmasc nonbinary person in the world, coming to love themself and their body. The heart of the book is about wrestling with masculinity, unlearning toxic masculinity, and learning to build their own new masculinity unbeholden to anything they were taught.
I really appreciated how they talked about the mistakes they made, how they perpetrated abuse, how they hurt women and people they loved in this cycle of pain and violence, as they were trying to be a man as they were taught, even when they were identifying as a butch lesbian. I found it so honest and painful to read about their past relationships and what it took for them to leave them and find healthy ways to express themself.
I did find parts of this somewhat dry. They end a lot of chapters with these very broad political statements, like “all trans people deserve health care." Which, yes, of course, but it felt sort of…tacked on. They places where they were trying to make these grand sweeping points instead of just writing their story were less engaging. When they were just writing about what happened to them and how it felt, that’s when the memoir shone the most. Loved the poems!
I did find parts of this somewhat dry. They end a lot of chapters with these very broad political statements, like “all trans people deserve health care." Which, yes, of course, but it felt sort of…tacked on. They places where they were trying to make these grand sweeping points instead of just writing their story were less engaging. When they were just writing about what happened to them and how it felt, that’s when the memoir shone the most. Loved the poems!
Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind by Annalee Newitz
This was very good and quite chilling. I would have been happier if it was twice as long. Newitz delves into the history of psychological warfare—not just disinformation and misinformation and propaganda, although all of those are part of, but the very specific ways in which the U.S. military has used it, and how the US government and various corporations and private companies and orgs now use it against US citizens. They write about how the term psychological warfare really came into common use during the Cold War, but they go much further back, talking about how the US government fostered anti-Indigenous racism during the Indian Wars using psychological warfare.
This book made me think a lot too about stories and words and language and how we use them. Stories—any stories—can be used as weapons. Newitz talks about comic books and how in the 1940s people thought comic books were destroying children and people tried to ban them. They talk about stories that can provide information or hope or help us imagine new worlds. Basically, they get into how stories can be use to further violent racist ideas and they can be used in support of movements. The essential fact is that we need to pay attention to all of this, not just know how to identify or be aware of propaganda and misinformation online, but understand the fact that stories are neutral, can be manipulated and used for all sorts of purposes, and that while they play a role in propaganda and psychological warfare, they can also play a role in justice and building a new world. They do a really good job not making generalizations like “art will save us” or “all propaganda is bad” or “poetry is about our humanity”. Instead, they make the argument that stories matter and are complex tools that shape how we understand the world, and to avoid psychological warfare we need to understand how they work.
This book made me think a lot too about stories and words and language and how we use them. Stories—any stories—can be used as weapons. Newitz talks about comic books and how in the 1940s people thought comic books were destroying children and people tried to ban them. They talk about stories that can provide information or hope or help us imagine new worlds. Basically, they get into how stories can be use to further violent racist ideas and they can be used in support of movements. The essential fact is that we need to pay attention to all of this, not just know how to identify or be aware of propaganda and misinformation online, but understand the fact that stories are neutral, can be manipulated and used for all sorts of purposes, and that while they play a role in propaganda and psychological warfare, they can also play a role in justice and building a new world. They do a really good job not making generalizations like “art will save us” or “all propaganda is bad” or “poetry is about our humanity”. Instead, they make the argument that stories matter and are complex tools that shape how we understand the world, and to avoid psychological warfare we need to understand how they work.
One thing I really love is how they talk about the idea of applied science fiction, the ways in which sci-fi and speculative writers use sci-fi as a way to explore ideas it is hard to explore in real life, and how those story laboratories, so to speak, can be then used, in various ways, to think about the real world we live in.
Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing
The prose poems where Ewing relates a real-life experience and then twists it with a mystical/fantastical ending were brilliant and chilling. The whole collection was stunning, but those ones really took my breath away.
Bestiary: Poems by Donika Kelly
This is an incredible collection. I read it one sitting; it was hard to stop reading, which is not something I usually say about poetry. Of course now I want to go and read it all again. Really surprising language. Just all around amazing.
(I'm adding these reviews years later and it is so funny to me how I used to write about poetry.)
(I'm adding these reviews years later and it is so funny to me how I used to write about poetry.)
Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color by Christopher Soto
A fantastic anthology featuring a staggering array of different kinds of poems, reflecting the wide diversity of queer experience. This is a fantastic place to start if you're looking for an introduction to some of the best queer poets working today. Many (though not all) of these poets have collections that I will now be seeking out.
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho by Sappho
Beautiful and eerie. Carson uses brackets to great effect, marking where Sappho's words have been lost. It's both extraordinary and heartbreaking, reading these tiny fragments of poems. The spaces where words and lines are missing echo louder than the words that are present, sometimes. It's also just stunning to read these sharp, imaginative, and graceful lines from so long ago.
One of my favorites: "just now goldensandaled dawn"
One of my favorites: "just now goldensandaled dawn"
Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith
Just an utterly breathtaking book of poetry. Smith writes about wide-ranging subjects, both vast and intimate--current events, gun violence, David Bowie, the universe and the nature of space, parenthood, race. The poems are exacting and gorgeous but also they breathe and were so easy to fall into in this really lovely way.
I listened to the audiobook, which Smith reads, and I highly recommend it. I loved hearing the weight of the words, the particular line breaks, the heft of each poem, in her voice. I know I'll want to return to it in print, so I can savor each poem, but this was a fantastic listen.
I listened to the audiobook, which Smith reads, and I highly recommend it. I loved hearing the weight of the words, the particular line breaks, the heft of each poem, in her voice. I know I'll want to return to it in print, so I can savor each poem, but this was a fantastic listen.
Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition by P. Carl
This book utterly floored me. Carl transitioned at 51, after a lifetime of knowing himself as a man but not living as one. The agility, humility, and self-analysis in this book is just brilliant. It's a book about wresting with masculinity, in all its ugly and benign forms. Carl interrogates how it felt to live as a woman, and all the complexities of how that life affected his experience of manhood. There is so much nuance and uncertainty and contradiction here—he’s willing to tell a lot of messy truths, and the result is a book that’s one specific story of one particular trans life, but also a book that gets at all the crooks and crannies of identity. This book also has some of the clearest and most breathtaking writing about bodies—and the ways that truth, knowledge, identity, trauma, history and experience live in bodies—that I’ve ever read.
A section of this memoir recounts how his transition affected his marriage, and those parts were painful to read. What amazed me was how many angles he was able to illuminate, even about something so intimate. He gets right to the heart of transphobia in queer communities, especially lesbian ones. But he also writes about the very real ways maleness and masculinity can harm women, and the complexity of how that plays out in queer relationships. It left me with a whole lot to chew on.
There are many gorgeous and smart lines throughout the whole thing, but here's one that will stay with me a long time: “We are still here together because we are holding on to the knowing that multiple truths, and multiple bodies, are possible.” In may ways, this book is a celebration of multiple truths, of the multiplicity of lives lived in one body, the multiplicity of bodies that one life can hold, of all the possibilities that exist in the complexity of human experience.
Also, brilliant, moving audio, narrated by the author. It is not a long listen (just over five hours) and worth every minute.
A section of this memoir recounts how his transition affected his marriage, and those parts were painful to read. What amazed me was how many angles he was able to illuminate, even about something so intimate. He gets right to the heart of transphobia in queer communities, especially lesbian ones. But he also writes about the very real ways maleness and masculinity can harm women, and the complexity of how that plays out in queer relationships. It left me with a whole lot to chew on.
There are many gorgeous and smart lines throughout the whole thing, but here's one that will stay with me a long time: “We are still here together because we are holding on to the knowing that multiple truths, and multiple bodies, are possible.” In may ways, this book is a celebration of multiple truths, of the multiplicity of lives lived in one body, the multiplicity of bodies that one life can hold, of all the possibilities that exist in the complexity of human experience.
Also, brilliant, moving audio, narrated by the author. It is not a long listen (just over five hours) and worth every minute.
A Safe Girl To Love by Casey Plett
Wow, I really loved this. I rarely pick up story collections anymore, but this is the third one I've read this year and I'm surprisingly into them. All of these stories are about trans women. Beyond that, they're about ordinary life moments--family, relationships, work. Very quiet, but each one was so impactful. Favorites: "Not Bleak" and "10 Hot Tips for Shopping Success".