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Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem is a collection that aches and pulses, alive with longing, grief, and defiance. It is a book that moves like water—eroding, sustaining, and shape-shifting—demanding that readers sit with the contradictions of survival and desire. Diaz’s poems weave together the personal and the political, exploring the aftermath of colonial violence on Indigenous communities while fiercely reclaiming love, body, and language. The result is a collection that is both a love song and an act of resistance, refusing to let Indigenous bodies be reduced to relics or statistics.

The relationship between body and land is central to this collection, often blurring into one entity. In Mojave thinking, Diaz reminds us, the words for body and land are almost identical, making their destruction indistinguishable. Her poetry renders the wounds of colonialism tactile—rain, blood, rivers, and cracked earth appear as motifs, reinforcing the deep connections between identity, environment, and historical trauma. Yet, amid the loss, there is also an insistence on pleasure, on the sacredness of touch. The body, often framed as a site of violence in colonial history, is here rewritten as a site of love, agency, and transformation.

Diaz’s language is breathtaking—both sparse and lush, sharp yet fluid. Her poetry moves between declarative, fragmented lines and sweeping, lyrical imagery, creating a rhythm that mimics the contradictions she navigates. She layers striking metaphors—maps as ghosts, America as a clot of clouds, a lover’s body as a lake-glint—crafting a landscape that is both haunted and radiant. The tension between visibility and erasure runs through these poems: the weight of existing in a country that seeks to erase Indigenous presence while simultaneously consuming its image.

Postcolonial Love Poem does not offer easy resolutions. Instead, it carves space for survival as an act of creation, for love as both a reckoning and a refuge. Diaz challenges the reader to hold grief and joy in the same breath, to witness history without turning away, and to recognize that language itself can be an act of reclamation. This collection is a masterwork of lyricism and defiance—a necessary read for those willing to step into its river and be changed by the current.

📖 Recommended For: Readers who appreciate lyrical, visceral poetry exploring colonialism, desire, and survival; those drawn to works that intertwine body, land, and language; fans of Ocean Vuong.

🔑 Key Themes: Erasure and Survival, Love and Intimacy, The Body as Landscape, Indigenous Identity and Resistance, Water and Transformation.

Amanda Peters’ debut short story collection, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, is a quiet meditation on grief, resilience, and the enduring bond between Indigenous people and the land. Through spare yet lyrical prose, Peters captures the weight of intergenerational trauma while insisting on the vitality of survival—a delicate balance between sorrow and defiance.

Each story in the collection offers a window into the complex realities of Indigenous life across time and place. In one, a grieving mother finds purpose as a water protector, her fight against state violence becoming an act of remembrance for her daughter. In another, an Indigenous family shelters their white French trading partners from English invaders, driven by a hard-earned empathy born from their own experiences of displacement. The titular story reflects on the lasting wounds of settler colonialism, as an Indigenous man reckons with how white settlers irrevocably altered his life. Time and again, Peters highlights the violent legacies of residential schools, the theft of language, and the slow, deliberate erasure of Indigenous identity. Yet, these stories are not defined solely by loss; the land itself emerges as a character, offering its own quiet promise of healing. Trees, rivers, and mud are not merely backdrops—they are witnesses, collaborators, and lifelines.

While Peters' storytelling is rooted in dignity and truth, I found myself longing for a stronger emotional connection to the characters. Though the writing is undeniably beautiful, the brevity of certain stories and the broad sweep across historical periods sometimes left me feeling unmoored. The collection's structure made it difficult to find a reading rhythm, and I finished the book admiring its themes more than remembering its people. This left me with a sense of respect, but not quite love.

That said, Waiting for the Long Night Moon is a valuable contribution to contemporary Indigenous literature. Peters reminds us that survival is resistance, and that memory—held in the soil, in language, in the body—is its own form of power. For readers seeking stories of resilience told with gentle lyricism and deep reverence for the earth, this collection offers a quiet but necessary voice.

📖 Recommended For: Readers drawn to lyrical, land-centered storytelling; those interested in Indigenous resistance, intergenerational trauma, and the resilience of community.

🔑 Key Themes: Land and Belonging, Grief and Resilience, Colonial Violence and Erasure, Memory as Resistance, Survival as Defiance.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US by Random House on April 15, 2025.

Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes is a novel that aches with tenderness, loss, and the quiet resilience of becoming. It is a story of love—romantic, familial, and self—braided with the jagged edges of trauma and the suffocating expectations of Black masculinity. Through Davis, a Juilliard-trained violist navigating the eve of his wedding to his white fiancé Everett, Norris crafts an intimate portrait of a person searching for beauty and safety in a world that has too often denied both.

Davis’s life is a study in dualities—grace and violence, yearning and restraint, visibility and concealment. Music is his sanctuary, but it cannot shield him from the specter of his father, The Reverend, whose rigid notions of manhood and simmering alcoholism once fractured their family. The novel’s structure, winding between past and present, reflects Davis’s own internal looping—his longing to escape his origins and his inability to fully sever those roots. Norris withholds the specifics of Davis’s estrangement from his father until the novel’s close, a revelation that is devastating yet familiar: the brutality that often meets Black queer softness.

Davis’s fixation on beauty—his clean-shaven face, the femme jumpsuit he wears to his wedding—is not mere vanity but survival, an armor against a world that punishes difference. Yet, even in his relationship with Everett, which offers stability and acceptance, there are undercurrents of power. Everett’s whiteness, his family’s strained liberal tolerance, and his own role as the “masculine” partner subtly reinforce Davis’s vulnerability. The novel’s exploration of desire is thus inseparable from race, class, and gender—a sharp critique that cuts as deeply as it heals.

When Davis ultimately recognizes her transness and chooses the name Vivienne, a gift from her father’s final letter, it is both a rebirth and a reckoning. The Reverend’s flawed love, his need for a son, had been suffocating—but it had also held, however imperfectly, an aching awareness of who Davis truly was. The novel’s final act is not neat closure but a tender step toward wholeness.

If I had any reservations, it was that certain subplots—like Olivia’s abortion—felt underdeveloped, disrupting the novel’s otherwise fluid emotional arc. Yet, this is a minor flaw in a book that left me raw and breathless. Vivienne is a character I will carry with me—a reminder that survival is its own form of grace, and sometimes, becoming ourselves is the most radical act of love.

📖 Recommended For: Readers drawn to emotionally rich literary fiction exploring Black queer and trans identities; those who appreciatt character-driven stories about familial trauma and healing; fans of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong and Bellies by Nicola Dinan.

🔑 Key Themes: Race and Masculinity, Gender Identity and Self-Discovery, Familial Expectations and Inheritance, Queerness and Intimacy, Beauty as Survival.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US by Soho Press on April 1, 2025.

Jeanne Thornton’s A/S/L is a deeply evocative novel that pulses with the ache of queer longing, the glitchy hum of '90s internet culture, and the fractured beauty of trans survival. Spanning both 1998 and 2016, the book traces the lives of Abraxa, Sash, and Lilith—once gender-questioning teens crafting a video game called Saga of the Sorceress in an online chatroom, now estranged trans women navigating the messy terrain of adulthood.

Thornton’s prose captures the jagged edges of trans becoming: at times dreamy and poetic, other times raw and disjointed, reflecting the precarity of forging an identity under systems designed to erase you. The book hums with the tension between fantasy and reality—between the worlds we build to survive and the ones that threaten to break us. The teens’ game-building is rendered with reverence, positioning video games as queer art forms—portals into self-determination, into worlds where bodies and identities are mutable, magic. This creative defiance carries into adulthood, where the characters remain tethered to their shared past, still reaching for that elusive sense of home.

Abraxa is a tempest of restless movement and fierce imagination, clinging to the belief that Saga of the Sorceress was something more than a game—that it was, and still is, real. Lilith, burdened by the Boy Scout creeds of loyalty and self-discipline, seeks safety in cisnormative approval yet yearns for something wilder. Sash, craving connection, funnels her emotions into storytelling and financial domination, grasping for intimacy in commodified spaces. Each woman aches to be seen—not as a symbol or spectacle, but as a person worthy of love, creation, and survival.

If the novel stumbles, it’s in its pacing; certain chapters drag, and the structure occasionally feels unwieldy. But the emotional core remains potent. Thornton refuses tidy resolutions—because trans lives are not tidy. Instead, she offers something more radical: the possibility of rebuilding, together.

📖 Recommended For: Lovers of introspective trans fiction, stories exploring online communities and digital subcultures, and readers drawn to narratives about queer friendship and creative world-building; anyone nostalgic for late '90s internet culture or interested in the intersections of gender, technology, and art; and fans of Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas.

🔑 Key Themes: Trans Identity and Becoming, Queer Community and Longing, Creativity as Survival, Digital Worlds and Self-Determination, Power and Vulnerability in Relationships.

C.D. Eskilson’s Scream / Queen is a razor-edged, defiant debut—a collection that howls into the night and reclaims the monstrous with teeth bared and lipstick immaculate. Blending the guttural aesthetics of horror cinema with the raw vulnerability of trans survival, Eskilson crafts poems that stalk the liminal spaces between fear and power, inheritance and resistance. Through the haunted echoes of films like Halloween, The VVitch, and Alien, the collection interrogates the violence inflicted upon trans bodies—both by the world and by the legacies etched into their bloodlines—while insisting on the ecstatic, radical potential of living anyway.

The poems pulse with a language that is at once jagged and lyrical, a body made of barbed wire and open wounds, but also shimmering possibility. Eskilson’s voice twists between fragmentation and fluidity, refusing easy containment. In “On Witchcraft,” gender is an incantation—a spell to summon multiplicity, to carve out space for bodies deemed impossible. “Confession from Medusa’s Head” electrified me with its refusal to apologize, giving voice to a survivor’s anger that is both sharp and righteous. “Intro to Film Theory” bristles against transphobia, unmasking the grotesque scripts imposed upon trans lives, while “Prey: A Gloss” grieves the horror genre’s long history of aligning queerness with monstrosity—then dares to reclaim that monstrosity as strength. And “My Roommate Buffalo Bill” gutted me entirely, transforming a site of transphobic cinematic violence into a space of solidarity and strange, necessary kinship.

Threaded through every piece is the specter of self-destruction—generations of mental illness pressing down like a curse—but also the tender, aching work of refusing to be devoured by it. The speaker claws their way toward a future beyond inherited ruin, rejecting the urge to shrink themselves to fit the world’s cruel gaze. There is rage here, yes, but also a longing to hold a self fully—to stretch, to roar, to coven with others who understand. Ultimately, Scream / Queen insists that the trans body, like any good final girl, is not just something to be feared or pitied—it is something that survives. Something that loves. Something that might, in the moonlight, look a little monstrous—and that is its power.

📖 Recommended For: Readers who crave visceral, genre-bending poetry; lovers of trans-centered narratives and horror media reinterpretations; those drawn to works exploring trauma, survivorhood, and self-reclamation; fans of Franny Choi and torrin a. greathouse.

🔑 Key Themes: Transness and Monstrosity, Intergenerational Trauma and Mental Illness, Gender and Body Autonomy, Survivor Anger and Healing, Queer Kinship and Resistance.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be released by Catapult on March 11, 2025 in the US.

I stopped reading On Breathing at around 20% because it simply wasn’t aligning with what I was looking for. As someone who’s deeply engaged in liberatory politics and interested in the intersection between radical political thought and psychoanalysis, I was hoping for a more critical exploration of how environmental catastrophe and care intersect with broader social and political systems. Instead, I found the book leaning heavily into personal, introspective reflections—from the author’s own struggles with asthma and her experiences as a psychoanalyst during COVID, to extended meditations on her infant daughter’s breathing.

This focus felt both off-target and, frankly, borderline problematic for me. I’m uncomfortable with literature that exploits a child’s narrative without the possibility of consent, and I wasn’t drawn to the reliance on older psychoanalytic ideas, especially those rooted in Freudian and Winnicottian thought, which I find outdated and unconvincing. Overall, I was bored, sometimes confused, and increasingly convinced that my time would be better spent on texts that not only engage my interests but also contribute to my personal and political growth. 

I think this might've been a bad book? Very unclear. There are several fatphobic scenes and some weird ableism. The pandemic didn't get enough of a focus to fully understand what was going on with it. This was one of those dystopian books that tries to focus on reflecting on humanity but I think instead just got weird and problematic. You can probably skip this one. 

I think maybe this was too high fantasy for me? It felt like it dragged on a bit, and I never got overly invested in the characters. It's not a bad book by any means, and I think there's a lot here that fans of Jemisin's The Fifth Season would enjoy. It just didn't resonate or stick with me the way it seems to have with a lot of other readers. 

This was a powerful yet dense look at the anti-psychiatry movement and the abolition of carceral psychiatry. There's a lot to love here - anti-capitalism, decolonial view of madness, anti-imperial and abolitionist views of mental health care. Nonetheless, it is highly academic and theoretical, to the point I'm not sure how much of it I retained, writing this brief review almost 3 months after having read it. It's not a bad book - just a thick one! Big rec for Health Communism fans. 

Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis is a sharp, unflinching critique of the feminisms that claim to be liberatory but ultimately reinforce oppression. Lewis takes on TERF ideology, white feminism, and the insidious ways respectability politics and ideological purity stifle truly radical movements. She refuses to romanticize feminism’s history, instead demanding a more self-critical, accountable, and abolitionist approach. It’s an urgent call to embrace discomfort and let go of defensive posturing in the pursuit of real liberation.

Despite my appreciation for the book’s aims, I found myself struggling to stay engaged. Lewis’s writing is dense, academically rigorous, and often paradoxical—a style that, while intellectually rich, made it difficult for me to focus. Her sharp, sometimes flippant tone also didn’t quite land for me. After two chapters, I realized I wasn’t getting anything new from it and decided to DNF. It’s not a bad book by any means; it just wasn’t the right fit for me.