whew. this collection started out real weird, with the Head in the toilet made of shit stalking a nameless woman, and got a little more intense with each successive story.

Reading this has been dramatically transformative for my personal ethics and career goals. Anyone even remotely interested in social justice, human rights and/or prison abolition should pick it up.

 Always love Butler's work. She can put incest, ovipositors or genetic ferality into a story and you'll just be like, "yeah, that makes sense." 

"The notion that all of these reforms can be accomplished piecemeal—one at a time, through disconnected advocacy strategies—seems deeply misguided. All of the needed reforms have less to do with failed policies than a deeply flawed public consensus, one that is indifferent, at best, to the experience of poor people of color. [...] Those who believe that advocacy challenging mass incarceration can be successful without overturning the public consensus that gave rise to it are engaging in fanciful thinking, a form of denial."

One of my biggest take aways from this book, outside of the truly horrifying recounting of America's racism, is that reform should be consciously movement-building in order to achieve forward motion. It taught me that challenging legal routes and financial backers are not the (only) way to change, because it will just perpetuate new forms of the same systems of control.