I'm unintentionally reading quite a few books about--or that at least touch on--the AIDS crisis this year. Detransition, Baby; Anesthesia; Gentrification of the Mind... And now Funeral Diva, which moved higher on my list of reading priorities when it won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Sneed opens her collection with a couple of prose pieces that contextualize the poems to come and set up the themes with which they're concerned: the impact of AIDS on Black gay men and lesbians, the legacy of slavery and the relationship of African Americans to Africa, police and state violence against Black people, and the author's life (both her childhood as an adoptee and her coming-of-age as a lesbian). It reads as an assertion of the power of language both as testimony and a way of creating liberatory futures. I won't say that Sneed is an Audre Lorde for today, because Lorde is timeless, and we will always need her work. But reading Funeral Diva evoked some of the same feelings as reading Sister Outsider for the first time.

I wish that I had known about this book and read it in high school, around the time I read The Bell Jar and Girl, Interrupted and would pick up any book featuring sad, smart girls with literary interests. I would have liked it much more, the debut-effort flaws in the writing would have been less apparent to me, and it probably would have become one of those books that I developed deep place-associations with: reading it in my bedroom or in the art classroom, waiting for the bell to ring.

Still, I read this in gulps, sinking into the characters' grief. I had expected this to be more of a campus novel, more focused on a codependent and intense friendship among girls obsessed with dead poets. Instead, Wolitzer focuses on only one of the girls, Claire, as she involves herself in the life of her favorite poet's parents, wrecked people who live by the ocean in the aftermath of their daughter's suicide by drowning. Claire cleans their house, sleeps in their daughter's bed, puts on her clothes, and believes that her ghost comes to Claire at night, all the while delving deeper into her grief for the brother she lost to leukemia.

If I had to describe this book in one word, it would be unbalanced. The pacing is off, characters are introduced and more or less discarded, and the tone is confused. But the writing has a hypnotic quality that made me feel fine about investing 215 pages' worth of time. I might try later Wolitzer to see how her style developed.

I decided to read this book after one of Rankine's poems was featured on the daily poem email to which I subscribe. Although that piece resonated, I found the rest of the poems here difficult to connect with. I felt like I was skimming over the top of them, unsure how to breach beneath the surface.

Sad, angry poems with a wonderful narrative sense and attention to vivid imagery and concrete detail: pretty much everything I look for in a poetry collection. I will want to own a copy of this at some point, because while I bolted down the ebook in a few great gulps, these pieces are worth savoring. I want more of Díaz's writing immediately.

I don't think that Matt Haig is the author for me. This is the second of his novels I've read. In both cases, I felt compelled to read them because people around me liked them so much, and both times, I was unimpressed. I feel a bit of an outsider.

My resistance to The Midnight Library is not the concept. I quite like books set in libraries, and library as afterlife (or limbo, I suppose) greatly appeals to me. Despite the sentimentality, there were times when I found Haig's narrative voice easy to sink into. And some of the lives Nora explored were genuinely interesting. I can certainly relate to having regrets and curiosity about what my life might be like now had circumstances been different. (Though with me, it's less "what if I was an Olympic swimmer?" and more "what if I hadn't grown up in a homophobic family and had felt supported enough to come out 15 years earlier?")

The problems I had with this book are ones this reviewer shares, especially the final one, which is a massive spoiler, so if you don't want to know the ending of the book, don't read the review.

Spoilers and discussion of suicide under the cut.

Spoiler

I just don't think that Haig's bootstraps approach to suicidal ideation is helpful. In fact, I think that it's irresponsible and even cruel to suggest that if you are suicidal or suffering from depression and anxiety, then you just aren't looking on the bright side enough, that you can get over it by being grateful just to be alive. To do so makes light of people's suffering.

Speaking from experience, being told to look on the bright side or to be grateful has never helped me through a period of suicidality. What helped wasn't some vague, glib concept of hope or potential, but having real, concrete things to live for. Sometimes it was thinking that my dog would be sad and confused if I disappeared and she didn't know why, so I needed to stay alive for her. Sometimes it was knowing that my loved ones would have to find my body, so I needed to stay alive so they didn't have to go through that. Sometimes it was getting to a point where the immediate situation I was in was going to change, and I felt like I could stick around to at least see if that helped. It was never just thinking that maybe things would get better somehow, and it was definitely never rehashing my every regret and thinking about how my entire life would be different if I had just made better decisions.

Thom's criticisms of how people in queer communities and social justice spaces often fail one another are spot-on, though she offers few concrete suggestions for change. I wish that I had read this during my "wow, if I disagree with some of my fellow leftist queers, I guess that does indeed make me a bootlicker" crisis, because it would have given me a much-needed reality check.

Perhaps my favorite essay in this collection is the straightforwardly-titled "How Neoliberalism Is Stealing Trans Liberation," which highlights the lack of real progress following 2014's "trans tipping point," despite increased media representation and near-constant "debate" of trans issues.

My favorite poems in this collection are "you are allowed to leave," "there is another girl out there," and "the witch's manifesto: a freakish ethics for fearsome living in the monstrous world."

It feels weird to consider writing a proper review of a book like this, so I'll just say that while not all of it applied to me, the parts that did were comforting, empowering, and useful.

Jenny Lawson's books always feel like friends who are weirder than me and, thus, are comforting.

Covers some of the same ground as Forward's book Toxic Parents, with a more specific focus on toxic dynamics between mothers and daughters. Useful despite its heteronormativity... Has anyone written books like these for LGBTQIA+ people?