aimiller's Reviews (689)

This was a beautiful short piece that really packed a ton of world building into so little space, and manages to raise so many beautiful points about memory and storytelling, as well as recount the trauma of power shifts and the fight to maintain or change power. I really am looking forward to reading the next story in this world, but I also feel like this was so beautifully contained on its own in many ways that are rare to see given the space of the novella.

The characters here are so delightfully rich despite the small space they occupy, and Gailey does a great job of making you feel Esther's dilemma and development. I love how you get so many different flavors of lesbian and also queer woman. 

Of course, the genre is an Issue and on the scale of "grappling with settler colonialism" I will say there is none; there are no explicitly Native characters, which in some ways is a good move, and the question of settler colonialism and its continual presence is not raised, nor is its violence interrogated beyond reference to the way the settler state in its dystopian form works. Native absence is felt particularly because of the genre and setting. 

This book is SUCH a good book for our current pandemic times; I said somewhere that Tamora Pierce books are 50% learning meditation, 50% crafting, and I stand by that but it's clearly deliberate with this series in particular. Just so soft and soothing to read, even the dramatic parts. And the character are fun even if they don't really feel super fleshed out in this space, and the relationships with mentors are so good. I'll definitely be rereading the rest of the series, but this was so good in this moment so if you need something short and soft, check it out!

Just an incredible collection, even if it's fairly small. I think the titular essay (which makes up the bulk of the essay) is obviously important and a great companion to The Cancer Journals while also being separate from them, and the other essays are as thoughtful and intense as her other work. The first essay about sadomasochism is a great resource I think for seeing clearly some antikink feminist work that is not as white as that debate tends to be portrayed. Just a small but powerful collection that I definitely recommend. 

Just really beautiful and honest. Johnson really lays his life out and his own coming to terms with himself while navigating the world around him; he's very explicit about this story as being one for himself and for other Black queer boys, and though I am not Black or a boy I really appreciated the deep tenderness with which he writes about family in particular. Definitely beautiful and I hope many, many kids get the chance to read this! 

Just an incredible, succinct and deeply powerful read that lays out how prison cannot be reformed, and how it has in fact only increased incredibly in the last 30-40 years. Davis manages to weave history, her personal experiences with the prison system, and gendered analysis of prison into a tight and deeply compelling argument that we must replace the prison system with other forms of justice that do not involve disappearing the poor and racialized. Definitely accessible and a critical read I'd recommend to anyone who has not yet encountered it before--and even if you have, I'd recommend reading it again. I know I will. 

An interesting collection; I think in some ways the huge, huge reach of it was helpful (you get many perspectives, a ton of different ways that people understand themselves in their own disabilities, as well as their own relationships to queerness) and in other ways it was kind of a hinderance. There was just so much and a lot of it felt a little whiplash-y. I'm not sure it's a collection I would recommend reading all together, though I think it can definitely be a resource for folks looking to add queer disabled writing to like a syllabus or something like that. Some of it I really enjoyed, some of it was thought provoking, and some of it was kind of just okay, but I think worth having read across the board.

This was a solid and interesting collection that I struggled a little bit with in the middle. I think the opening essay and the final essay felt the best, to me--I think some of the other essays straddle a line of navel-gazing and voyeurism (which Jamison acknowledges!) that didn't hit home for me personally, and I think also because those essays felt more reaching for an answer that was not there, rather than, as in "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain," refusing an answer altogether. I think I also found her reflections on empathy frankly to be more interesting when rooted in what she wanted from others in terms of empathy (which is what I mean, I think, by a kind of "internal" world of empathy--the work we want others to do for us--rather than how we should extend empathy to others, which comes across as weirdly stilted for me--almost a kind of floundering, which, while maybe that's what she was trying to convey about conscious empathy, kind of fell flat.) 

But I do think that this collection was definitely powerful, and as I said, the first and the final essays definitely were incredible and left me a lot to chew on. I definitely feel like I will return to the last essay again and again. 

A solid, interesting collection. I think if you're reading alongside other work about policing and police abolition right now (as I know many of us are, myself included,) I don't know that there's a whole lot here that is super new that isn't covered in more detail elsewhere. I think these short pieces through definitely could be used in excerpt, and I do think that the chapter on police violence against pregnant women in particular was the most new information to me and the most enraging in part because of that. If you want an easy entry, this is definitely a great place to start, and there are number of different voices from activists and writers, if you would prefer that to some other books out there that might be more academic (which isn't to say this isn't rigorous, but I think this is maybe an easier read than even like The End of Policing, which I read right before this.) 

Definitely pick up if you're interested in teaching short pieces on police violence! Super worth it from a teaching perspective, I think. 

This was just gorgeous and lovely. Madden writes about women with a tenderness and affection that makes me love women even more, in all of their flaw and rage. The atmosphere alternates between almost ethereal and then these just blood-chilling moments of that being shattered, a return to harsher reality. Her writing about her father is of course amazing, but I keep returning to the way she write about women and how much I love it; just a care and affection that we see so rarely in writing, and it's so so good. Definitely recommend it for that reason.