bisexualbookshelf's reviews
793 reviews

Abolition asks: what if no one were disposable? What if healing required care, not cages? All This Safety Is Killing Us is a blistering, brilliant response to these questions—a collection of essays and visual art that rejects the myth of safety through surveillance and exposes the carceral scaffolding propping up American healthcare. Edited by Carlos Martinez and Ronica Mukerjee, and peer-reviewed by its contributors, the anthology reimagines what it means to be healthy in a world obsessed with punishment.

From ER trauma bays to prison infirmaries, from mandated reporting to border militarization, these essays speak with clarity and fire. Contributors—clinicians, organizers, incarcerated activists—trace how policing, prisons, and the family policing system (FPS) not only fail to create safety but actively produce harm, disease, and death. This is health justice work rooted in abolition, where care is not conditional and survival is not up for debate.

Mihir Chaudhary’s standout piece on the presence of police in trauma bays captures the dissonance between healing and surveillance. Her observations—clinical yet gutting—detail how law enforcement disrupts care, violates patient confidentiality, and deepens trauma. In another standout, Naomi Schoenfeld and Jenn Heresteen interrogate carceral psychiatry, revealing how even “non-police” crisis responses often replicate the same punitive logic.

The essays are as intersectional as they are uncompromising. Leroy F. Moore Jr.'s reflections on disability justice, and the critical work by Jenna Heath, Elizabeth Hur, and Nicole Mitchell Chadwick on the FPS and criminalization of pregnancy, lay bare the racialized, gendered, and ableist foundations of the carceral medical system. Again and again, we are asked: how can anyone heal in a place built to punish?

What emerges is a call—not just to dismantle, but to dream. Abolition here is not absence, but presence: of mutual aid, of trust, of systems that love instead of surveil. All This Safety Is Killing Us is not just a book I’ll recommend—it’s a manifesto I’ll press into the hands of every healthcare worker I know. Urgent, visionary, and devastatingly clear, this collection is abolitionist medicine, healing justice, and harm reduction at their most necessary.

📖 Read this if you love: abolitionist frameworks in healthcare, radical critiques of carceral systems, or the works of Mariame Kaba, Dorothy Roberts, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

🔑 Key Themes: Carceral Medicine and Medical Racism, Disability Justice and Reproductive Autonomy, Policing and Public Health, Abolition as Healing and Care.

I process sound less clearly than text (trauma brain things), so my audiobook reviews tend to be shorter and more surface-level than my usual ones. I don’t take notes while listening, and I often come away with impressions rather than detailed analysis. Still, I’m committed to reviewing every single book I read, even when the format changes how I engage. This is my way of honoring the listening experience—with softness, presence, and care. Thanks for reading!

Review:
My biggest qualm with this book is why did it suddenly get gay in the middle??? And you had to bury one of the gays???? Cmon, Ashley Flowers!

While this was fun to listen to, I was annoyed by the end. Flowers uses every crime thriller trope that exists, leading the narrator to consider so many potential suspects and motives, I could hardly keep track of where her investigation stood. The dual POVs/timelines made it that much worse.  And ultimately, the book didn't accomplish anything other than adding another brain off-y "dead girl" story to an already oversaturated industry.

If you want an audiobook to dissociate to, this one works well! That's the only good thing about it. 

I wish I could rate this book 6 out of 5 stars. Reading You or Someone You Love by Hannah Matthews felt like being held—gently, fiercely, with steady hands that have done this before. With the poetic clarity of someone who has sat beside grief, relief, and everything in between, Matthews offers a vision of abortion care rooted in tenderness, not terror. This is a book that breathes: lyrical and grounded, intimate and expansive, every page pulsing with care.

Matthews writes like a doula speaks—present, precise, and deeply attuned to the body and its wisdom. Her reflections span clinic rooms, herbal lineages, and history’s silenced corners, insisting that abortion is not a monolith but a deeply human experience, shaped by culture, context, and consent. She invites readers to see abortion not as surgery or sin, but as a sacred choice—a choice that can protect, liberate, and honor life in all its forms.

She offers both the visceral and the practical: rituals of aftercare, digital safety tips, pain management options, and reflections on the intersection of abortion with queerness, disability, and systemic violence. Matthews traces abortion’s Indigenous and communal roots, names the harm caused by medical and legal gatekeeping, and insists that “pro-life” is a misnomer for the anti-abortion agenda. Through it all, she returns again and again to the truth that abortion creates futures—and that those who seek them are the only experts of their own stories.

This book doesn’t sensationalize abortion. It reveres it. It demands we move past judgment and into justice. Whether you’ve had an abortion, love someone who has, or want to better understand the fullness of reproductive care, this book is a balm, a blueprint, and a battle cry. Matthews doesn’t just tell us abortion is ordinary—she shows us that it can also be sacred. Thank you, Hannah. We love you.

📖 Read this if you love: tender political writing, abolitionist reproductive justice frameworks, or someone who has had an abortion.

🔑 Key Themes: Bodily Autonomy and Consent, Abortion as Community Care, Queerness and Reproductive Justice, Disability Justice and Harm Reduction, Medical Surveillance and Anti-Carceral Ethics.

Some books don’t so much unfold as unravel—like a tangled thread tugged gently through grief, memory, and love until what’s left is soft, frayed, and quietly shimmering. That’s how And Then the Gray Heaven felt to me: not plot-driven, but mood-bound, elliptical, and achingly tender. At its heart is Jules, a sharp, dissociative narrator grieving the loss of their beloved partner B, whose death in a freak accident cracks open the bureaucratic cruelty and emotional fragility of queer mourning under capitalism.

Jules is a beautifully unsteady voice—cynical yet earnest, shaped by Florida’s humid neglect, foster care trauma, and the long shadow of childhood dissociation. Their grief doesn’t look like clean stages but like swimming in murky water: sometimes soothing, sometimes drowning. Katz’s prose mirrors this emotional ebb and flow, moving between cutting observational humor and surreal beauty. The writing is lyrical without feeling indulgent, fragmented without losing clarity, and always reaching toward something—someone—just out of reach.

This is a novel about queer love as resistance, about what it means to remember and be remembered when systems would rather forget you. It reframes burial not as an end but a beginning—an act of love and reclamation. Jules’s road trip with Theo to return B’s ashes to museums becomes a queer odyssey, a gesture of devotion against the erasure that often haunts trans and nonbinary death. Through it all, art becomes a thread of continuity and protest, a way to insist: we were here.

While the plot sometimes drifted and didn’t always stick with me, the language did—glittering, splintered, and full of ache. And Then the Gray Heaven may not leave you with clear answers, but it will leave you with a feeling: of something quietly sacred breaking open and blooming in the wreckage.

📖 Read this if you love: tender meditations on queer grief, poetic character-driven narratives, stories that center chosen family and the politics of memory, or the works of Ocean Vuong.

🔑 Key Themes: Queer Grief and Love, Chosen Family and Care Networks, The Bureaucratization of Death, Memory and Artistic Legacy, Trans Erasure and Reclamation.

I didn’t expect a book about debt to feel like a balm, but Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay held me in a way few books ever have. As someone currently crushed under various kinds of debt, I’ve spent years believing that weight was mine alone to bear—a private shame I just had to endure. This book shattered that illusion and offered something I didn’t know I needed: permission to fight back.

What moved me most was its central argument—that debt is not just a personal hardship, but a political condition. The idea of organizing around indebtedness felt revolutionary. I'd never considered my debt as something I could leverage for collective power, only something to quietly suffer. But the authors argue that debt connects us—not in failure, but in shared exploitation under capitalism.

The book’s analysis is both sharp and expansive. It clearly shows how debt compounds other crises—housing insecurity, unemployment, mental illness—not by accident, but by design. I was stunned to learn that student loans can't be discharged through bankruptcy in the U.S., and that even COVID stimulus checks were seizable to pay debts. That cruelty is staggering, and yet, it’s the logical outcome of a system that treats poverty as a moral failing.

What really lingered with me was the way the book broke down concepts like financialization, neoliberalism, and municipal debt without losing clarity or urgency. From the racialized roots of credit scoring to the brutal aftermath of the Flint and Detroit water crises, the authors reveal how debt is used to punish the already marginalized. And still—they insist that resistance is possible. That defaulting can be an act of revolt. That redistribution is not only necessary, but achievable.

I closed this book feeling cracked open and galvanized. If we want liberation, we must be willing to reject the debts that were never ours to begin with. This book isn’t just theory—it’s a blueprint for the solidarity we desperately need.

📖 Read this if you love: anti-capitalist manifestos, accessible radical theory, and the works of adrienne maree brown or Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

🔑 Key Themes: Debt and Social Control, Neoliberalism and Austerity, Racial Capitalism and Carceral Economies, Collective Power and Debtor Organizing. 

Thank you to my love Lanelle for reading this aloud with me. You absolutely can't go wrong with this beautiful graphic novel documenting the work of queer and trans activists living among us today. Special shout-out to the piece that included a QR code for an ASL translation!

Audiobook review disclaimer:
I process sound less clearly than text (trauma brain things), so my audiobook reviews tend to be shorter and more surface-level than my usual ones. I don’t take notes while listening, and I often come away with impressions rather than detailed analysis. Still, I’m committed to reviewing every single book I read, even when the format changes how I engage. This is my way of honoring the listening experience—with softness, presence, and care. Thanks for reading! 

Review:
Oh god, I love the fucked up and weird ass plot of this book. This is technically a reread, first time in print, this round on audio. I still love the plot, the weird and fucked up characters, and the found family dynamic. There were a lot of comments that don't fly in my book politically or ethically (it's a white, cishet male author) so I didn't enjoy it as much as I did the first time I read it a few years ago, but it still goes down as a "WTF Did I Just Read?" classic in my book. 

Audiobook review disclaimer:
I process sound less clearly than text (trauma brain things), so my audiobook reviews tend to be shorter and more surface-level than my usual ones. I don’t take notes while listening, and I often come away with impressions rather than detailed analysis. Still, I’m committed to reviewing every single book I read, even when the format changes how I engage. This is my way of honoring the listening experience—with softness, presence, and care. Thanks for reading! 

Review:
I went into this hoping for more plot heavy sci-fi and what I got was much more lyrical and philosophical exploration of humanity. Not a bad thing, but not really what I was looking for on audio. Not sure I retained anything that happened!

Audiobook review disclaimer:
I process sound less clearly than text (trauma brain things), so my audiobook reviews tend to be shorter and more surface-level than my usual ones. I don’t take notes while listening, and I often come away with impressions rather than detailed analysis. Still, I’m committed to reviewing every single book I read, even when the format changes how I engage. This is my way of honoring the listening experience—with softness, presence, and care. Thanks for reading! 

Review:
This was so interesting and fun! I loved the diverse rep and the dynamics between all the characters. I also enjoyed the subtle subversion of the various myths around mermaids. Thanks to my girlfriend Lanelle for introducing me and listening with me <3

Audiobook review disclaimer:
I process sound less clearly than text (trauma brain things), so my audiobook reviews tend to be shorter and more surface-level than my usual ones. I don’t take notes while listening, and I often come away with impressions rather than detailed analysis. Still, I’m committed to reviewing every single book I read, even when the format changes how I engage. This is my way of honoring the listening experience—with softness, presence, and care. Thanks for reading! 

Review:
I have no memory of what happened in this book but it worked as background noise! I find Blake Crouch to generally be good for that, even if his books are a bit forgettable.