Reviews
Can you ever really know someone else? The cliche is you can’t know someone until you’ve walked in their shoes. Perhaps that’s true. But does that mean you don’t know your partner? Will you ever? And if one wanted to, what would it take to get there? Read More
Thanks to queer theory – and I mean that sincerely – discursive gymnastics are now an amusing accompaniment to our usually failed attempts to define slippery identity categories that we, by turns, lean into and resist as members of the queer community. I am as guilty as the next gay-queer of both grasping for and pushing against some tangible-yet-nebulous form of gayness. I spend a great deal of time thinking about how we define ourselves, think ourselves into the world, and navigate life as individuals and parts of larger wholes. I don’t have many answers; this makes me restless. Multitudinous as I am, though, I quite like being restless. Which brings me to my recently concluded excursion into the world of Bad Gays by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Read More
In Cassandra Khaw's haunting new novella, "The Salt Grows Heavy," the chilling taiga serves as a backdrop to a macabre fairy tale featuring a mute mermaid princess, haunted by the trauma of a cruel prince's exploitation, a mysterious plague doctor, and a pack of feral forest children. Read More
In a compelling exploration of racial capitalism, Monica Huerta illuminates the intricate relationship between photography, property, and the body commodity through a critical analysis of copyright law. By intertwining queer performance theory with legal discourse, Huerta skillfully reveals the profound implications of juridical power on photographic mediums, offering readers a rich and thought-provoking perspective on the intersection of art, law, and societal structures. Read More
Sandy Lake is as known for its crime as it is for its lake and small-town charm, and Joshua Moehling's sophomore novel, Where the Dead Sleep, beautifully marries quaint and thrilling. Everyone knows everyone, and, more importantly, everyone's got a secret. Read More
Described as an “incantatory long poem, [that] draws the reader into a dreamworld where the barrier between life and death grows porous, populated by ancestors and spirits,” Dream of Xibalba by Stephanie Adams-Santos is hard to give a synopsis of. The difficulty risked in the book avoids easy summary. A note in the table of contents provides a clue into this difficulty: “[This is a]poem in twelve parts, as in the hours of a clock. The fragments are untitled; the following are first lines.” The word fragment implies an incomplete nature and a lack of resolution. Read More
Cassandra Whitaker takes us into the weird and wonderful queer world of Michael Chang's newest poetry collection in this review! Read More
Vinnie Heaven takes on everything from queer homelessness to magical queer deer in their third play Faun. Read More
In her new memoir Love and Money, Sex and Death, theorist and professor McKenzie Wark faces these questions. Told as a sequence of letters to everyone from her mom to ex-lovers to herself, she takes readers into her past and the experiences and people who made her what she is today. The book travels from her youth in Newcastle through time spent in China and as a professor in Sydney before ultimately settling in New York City. Read More
Many writers try, but few capture, as Brandon Taylor does, the aesthetic texture of life under late capitalism in America: its petty cruelties, chewy atmospheres, and taut social relations. More expansive in terms of scope and characterization than his debut, Real Life – in which we view life mainly through the lens of a single protagonist – The Late Americansmakes a tour into, through, and between the lives of a band of troubled souls living in an Iowa college town. Read More
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