laura_sackton's Reviews (170)

I liked very few of these poems.
The few I liked were very good.
Not enough language wonder for me, but I think this is a collection that will resonate with a lot of people, and I'm glad it exisits.

What a brilliant way to tell a history.
With specificity and care.
Digging into the flawed archive, giving up the burden of proof.

I have been meaning to read this forever and I was not disappointed. Ryan goes into detail about all sorts of periods in Brooklyn's history: the era of Walt Whitman, the navy yard and the waterfront which was a huge place for queers to meet, the artists who lived there in the 1920s and 1930s, including a commune (Auden, Carson McCullers, composers, singers, etc.), the early Black queer history, the incredible queer life going on during WWII. All of this is interesting, but what makes this book shine is Ryan’s approach to history. He talks about how when he started writing the book, most queers he knew didn’t think Brooklyn had much of a queer history. 

So he digs into it, showing not just that queers lived and thrived there, but talking about how we do history, and how queer history is so often hard to see because of who’s in charge of the archive. So much of the history of queer lives in early Brooklyn, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, comes from police records and arrests, and from medical establishments—doctors interviewing trans people, police raids, etc. This archive is not in the words of queer people, and so in order to find the true history there is so much digging and reworking of the archive you have to do. He is so careful to think about not only his sources but about how they came to him, not only who is talking and remembered but who isn’t.

He also traces a simple but fascinating history of the progression of ideas about gender and sexuality in 20th century America. One thing I can’t stop thinking about is this idea that “gay” and other identifies, i.e. the homosexual as an identify, is quite new, and in the early 20th century it was all tied up with gender and also behavior. There is this idea that it’s hard to live a life if you can’t name yourself, it’s hard to live a queer life if you don’t have access to ideas, and there is truth in that, but the reverse is also true: if something isn’t named, it is harder to hate and legislate against that thing. There was a lot of freedom in Brooklyn before Word War II—cruising, sex workers, gay artists in relationships, working class folks and women in factories, sailors having sex with men—and it wasn’t always remarked upon or punished. All this was happening before “homosexuality” became a thing. When straight people finally started to study queer people and define sexuality as something that defined a person, that was innate, it became easier to legislate against queerness

So a huge part of this book is about the history of ideas and how they affect queer life, and also about how this idea of progress as a straight line is totally false. So much of queer history has been lost or is unremembered and unrecorded—not because it doesn’t exist, but because people didn’t think of themselves in the terms we use today. I love that he gets into this.

This history is more straightforward and direct than Wayward Lives, but I think it is trying to do a similar thing, in that Ryan is looking between the lines, and he’s also using his own vantage point, i.e. taking people at their word, rather than requiring a burden of proof. His ideas and understanding of queernesses is expansive, esp. in relation to people like Marianne Moore or Willa Cather, both of whom were queer but didn’t fit into a lesbian box. And he’s able to use his own vantage to write all of that as queer history without dissecting it or forcing these people he’s studying to adhere to modern understandings of queerness and gender. 

I was so moved by the care he takes to write about people, how he examines his own biases, thinks about the stories he isn’t telling. I also thought it was so smart and interesting how deeply he looked at the built environment of the city and its infrastructure and it affects queer life. The subway and public restrooms created places for gay men to cruise, so queer life flourished. Coney Island was deeply queer, in the spaces it offered, in its working class origins and its bathhouses. The Brooklyn Navy Yard was massively important, as were various same sex environments, like the factories where butch women found work during World War II. The Brooklyn Bridge, which connected Brooklyn to Manhattan. The February House commune and other private apartments that became spaces where queer people could gather. Specific streets known for cruising, sex work, queer clubs. How Robert Moses (evil) helped destroy Brooklyn as a flourishing center of queer life. All of this is to say that this book does an incredible job showing how deeply place, environment, infrastructure, public space, buildings, etc. affect culture and queer life. 

Wrong book/wrong time/wrong format.
I struggled.
Still, there were sentences that left me breathless.

Scenes of free.
Poems of free.
Language, spilled and free.

Not into it.
Kinda clunky.
But I liked its quiet queerness.

This is book that digs into Zionest brainwashing and indoctrination and propaganda.
And it digs into the long, long history of Palestinian resistance.
Enraging and, also, little specks of hope.

Absolutely brilliant history/archive/dreaming of Indigenous California.
A weaving many truths.
An invitation into storytelling.

Play! Joy! Friendship!
What a delicious poetry.
What odd and serene and spectacular arrangements. 

So real!
Excruciating, in a good way.
Incredible characterization of kids and adults.


This is such a brilliant book. It’s about a queer teen with IBD who is dealing with so much: endless pooping, feeling alone, her mom dating her best friend’s mom, having crushes on girls, a first crush and kiss, messy friendships with her best friend, a new relationship with her body as she comes to understand herself as someone with a chronic illness. 

This was such an intense read that I found excruciating for a lot of reasons, partly because Al mostly feels embarrassment and anxiety. She is embarrassed about everything. It’s not just her body, having to poop, and it’s not even being queer and being afraid of what people will think. It’s like every feeling she has is mortifying. Being perceived is mortifying, her mom talking to her, having a crush, having feelings—she says over and over again how embarrassing it is to exist in all these ways. And of course her queerness and her chronic illness intersect with that and are part of that. A huge part of the book is her finding a support group with other kids with the same chronic illness and how she finds ways to feel less shame and embarrassment with them because they get it and because they are open about their bodies and bodily functions. 

But also some of Al’s anxiety and embarrassment are not directly related to her illness, and it made me think a lot about how much of kids at that age, 12, being embarrassed is just natural human puberty and how much is cultural, how much is because we teach kids from a very young age that having bodies is something gross, that anything not “normal” is gross, that feeling and having emotions is gross. I just felt it all so acutely in my chest, her going through all this stuff and having this amazing supportive best friend and mom and mom’s girlfriend but not telling any of them because she feels so alone, and then she becomes selfish and insufferable, and it's this cycle of silence and isolation that honestly I still see playing out in my own life and I’m 38. 

Everything about this book felt so real. The mom character who’s trying to help but just asks her about her stomach all the time, whose own worry makes Al worry more, so they can’t communicate. I don’t have a chronic illness but I have experienced this exact same thing with my mom more than once. All the time. And Al, too, she’s so annoying, she says "whatever!" and slams her door and doesn’t want to talk but also deeply wants adult support and love and when she finally ends up letting go and showing herself to her mom and Beth (girlfriend) she’s sobbing into them, wanting comfort. We are all so much, we’re all going through so much, it takes so much work to reach out and see other people, when your’e 12, when you're 38.

Love love love the model of health care (amazing doctor) and peer support around chronic illness that is mirrored here, love how Al has to learn so much about her own disease, how she feels isolated and angry at first and it’s very much community and shared experience and people who get it and who don’t try to fix it but just sit with her and share that eventually helps her cope and feel okay. 

Also I’ve been thinking a lot about earnestness and the whole thing with Al being so embarrassed about having a body with needs and feelings is making me think about that, and how kids are sort of automatically open to talking about stuff and feeling how they feel, and how that goes away as they get older, and I think we kind of force kids out of earnestness. I think we teach them in this society that earnestness hurts, and that’s why someone like Al feels like it will be the end of the world if someone knows she wants to kiss a girl. 

This was such a well plotted book with deep characterization and such real situations and emotions and it felt just the right amount of hopeful and tender and funny while getting into some serious angst and pre-teen on the edge of teen drama and hardship that really touched me as well as making me cringe. 

Angry, sad, fierce, hoping.
Direct.
Not my kind of poetry, but it might be yours.