This was really incredible--it was so accessible while also being theoretically rich, and Driskill manages to be both tribally specific with hir framework and also provide opportunities for other Two-Spirit people in other nations to find ways to use hir framework for themselves. It also clearly does incredible work in pushing forward Two-Spirit critique, and situating that as a huge addition to queer studies and queer of color critique, which so infrequently address settler colonialism.

The second chapter will almost definitely be on a syllabus of mine in the future, and is just incredible historical work interwoven with Driskill's personal narrative. S/he manages to do so much here, in such a relatively small and accessible space.

This is a really incredible anthology that manages to collect decades' worth of work by queer poets of color and give you an amazing taste of the variety and possibility. I want to go out and read so much more work by all these poets; it has works by the sort of "obvious" poets, but also newer, then-up-and-coming poets, and poets whose work is perhaps less immediately thought of. Favorite poems in this include Denice Frohman's "once a marine biologist/told me octopuses have three hearts", "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" by Ocean Vuong, "Heavy" by Hieu Minh Nguyen, and "Wet Dream" by Allyson Ang. Honestly though, I loved pretty much all of these poems, and their variety is really a strength of this collection.

Just a stunning masterpiece. Morrison's writing floats while also digging in deep--she manages to make this hazy world that also digs into you so deeply. The relationship at the center of the book is incredibly written, and she explores it with such deftness. I can't say anything in this review that hasn't been said before about this book, but it's immense and will be a book I definitely return to again and again.

This book I found to be mostly okay? It was far more of a War Book (even if it wasn't focused necessarily on individual generals or whatever) than I was expecting (though I'm not sure what I expected,) and sometimes in his attempts towards aping a kind of journalistic Truth, Hochschild's historical imagination is limited (particularly regarding anarchist Catalonia) which is boring, but it wasn't super appalling to me in most respects. (Though there was a VERY weird throwaway line about how there are no working class Jewish people any more? Like don't be casually gross?)

Overall I didn't find this book terrible, but it also like wasn't my favorite book in the world? If you have a white dad who likes war books, he'd probably really like it. It's slightly more thoughtful than your average war book, so it has that going for it.

Oh this was just delightful; it was definitely fantasy, but not So Fantasy that I felt alienated or struggled to get into it and understand the world. Honestly I just found this book very deeply charming; I found Fitz very easy to root for and be invested in, and the surrounding cast are each so intriguing and interesting in turn, while also definitely serving their role in Fitz's life. His trials and tribulations for the most part were pretty well-paced, though my biggest complaint about the book is that the final action seemed to happen a little too quickly.

Otherwise, I was just deeply into Fitz and his journey from pretty much minute one, and I really look forward to reading more about him and his friends (and enemies?) If you want fantasy but like low-key fantasy, I would say this book is definitely a good one!

A really beautiful memoir, tracing Moraga's relationship with her mother and her mother's history. I think it didn't click with me entirely because of where I'm at in my life, and so some of Moraga's long mourning for her mother as her mother succumbed to Alzheimer's felt repetitive to me, but might connect better to someone who has had to go through something similar. Regardless, Moraga's explorations of her family's dynamics and what it means to lose a matriarch were really powerful, and this is a book I might return to in the future.

Really more like a 3.5 I guess--enjoyable in a way I suspect it was supposed to be, but some of the pacing felt weird to me; the last 100 pages felt kind of rushed, and in some ways that tension between having spent so much time on the first half of the book and this rushed ending made me feel kind of confused about what the point of the book was supposed to be. Is it about Vivian learning it doesn't matter if she sleeps with a bunch of dudes? It certainly doesn't feel that it's actually about

her relationship with Frank

in any real capacity.

I'm like uncomfortable with my discomfort about this book; much of it has to do with like narratives about Rich People going among poorer people, and trying to cultivate empathy for people in that capacity in a time when I'm not very interested in those kinds of narratives. I will say it's very readable for the most part, and it's not an especially bad book, but it's not one I fell in love with, and the weird pacing made me confused about what (if anything) I was supposed to take away from it. Books don't have to have takeaways, and I thought this was going to be a book without them, and was totally comfortable with that, so then I guess it felt sort of shoehorned in at the end. But it was fast, it wasn't hard to read beyond grappling with my own discomfort, and it wasn't a bad book! Just not one I loved.

Just a really beautiful and haunting collection. The collection runs in an almost-chronological fashion, so it transforms in this almost story-like fashion, as you watch the tone of the poems shift from concerns of boyhood to elsewhere. It's so worth seeing that transformation especially in considering the shifting way of approaching looking death in the face all the time throughout. There are so many poems in this that I loved; the "Dispatches from the Black Barbershop, Tony's Chair." triad was so good, and "When I say that loving me is kind of like being a Chicago Bulls fan" is just. really incredible.

This was a really incredible look at African American historic foodways, with a really careful look at specificity of geography and time. Twitty manages to draw all of these threads together without it feeling confusing very often, though sometimes the sea of names--which are necessary to both give credit to those from whom he's drawing his work, as well as his own genealogy and those of others--gets a little confusing, and I might have been better equipped to deal with if I had not tried to read this whole book in like four days. I will say that as someone who comes at genealogy testing from a perspective of Native people trying to keep a grasp on their sovereignty, some of the stuff on DNA testing rubbed me the wrong way--not that Twitty is guilty of the levels of like genealogy crimes as someone like Elizabeth Warren, but it was uncomfortable to see him talk about it without mentioning those issues.

But those parts of it regardless, this is definitely a powerful and important read, and I really recommend it to people who want to think about food more critically, and consider its history alongside justice.