laura_sackton's Reviews (170)

This is wild punk anarchist poetry, most of it is in all caps. I read it in a sitting and it didn't leave me with much. It's a book about fucking up the system and not being who the system wants you to be. It's about declaring yourself outside, about revolutionary radical love outside of colonialism, about fucking shit up and being angry and using that anger to ignite the world. It’s about the kind of care that folks can give each other. A raging song about a radical future. I'm here for this, though the poetry itself, the lines, the words, the form, didn't work so well for me.

I think there’s a lot in it that I missed, and I think there’s a lot in it that is interesting and beautiful. I wonder sometimes if I’m closing myself off to certain kinds of poetry. This is an interesting question to ponder as I write more poetry, as I think about the kinds of poetry I love. I don’t want to stay inside the lines. I don’t want to expect something from poetry books. So it’s interesting for me to think about the times and spaces where I can open up and expand my brain and think, okay, what is this book doing that I’m not seeing? Why is it not making me feel anything? Could I read it differently to find feeling in it, and if not, who is the feeling here for? I'm looking for ways for poetry to make me feel bigger and stranger even when I’m not in love with it. 

This is an incredible collection. It is about police violence, especially in the Twin Cities during covid, it is about the burning world and living in the burning world. It is about moments of sweetness, it is about climate change and grief and what it means that the world is ending, and mostly, for me, it is about poetry. How can it matter. How it matters. Does it matter. It is. 

Over and over in these poems Smith rejects poetry. They write about how poetry will not save us, how poems are love, are not solutions, are not material. There are so many poems about what they have gotten wrong in poems, how they hide in poems, how instead of doing poems pick up the weapons. Poem after poem reckons with the futility of poems. 

And yet. Poems. A whole book of poems. It’s hard to say what I mean but this is a book that directly confronts the failure of poetry, and goes on making poems anyway. Poetry is alive and it is here and it is fucked and it is beautiful. There's no lesson or moral. Smith does not offer a cohesive philosophy of poetry or living or queerness or Blackness or resistance or joy. Their form, their craft, their heart, the world, poetry itself—is way too big and messy for that. 

This is not an easy or simple book in any way. There are no answers. No one is let off the hook. There is only the trying, the journey, the ongoing. It’s hard to explain how much of an impact this book had on me, the sitting inside this impossible paradox and just saying, okay, here it is. We go on living. 

Absolute brilliance, can’t wait to read it again. 

This was…something. A lot. I started it in March, set it aside, then restarted it. I loved the first 80 or so pages. The voice of this trans woman on the edge of her 30th birthday, traveling around, talking shit, talking about all of her woes and all the shit she deals with, being super honest and upfront and angry and snarky, going on and on about her obsessions, her thoughts about queer and trans culture, her thoughts and feelings about dating as a trans woman, all her thoughts about men and sex and transphobia…like, I was so into it. She is so funny, so brash, she tells it like it is, the book is full of ALL CAPS and asides and weird little stories and all these tangents into her obsessions, books she loves, crushes, etc. The book is weird, totally singular, there isn’t really a plot, it’s just being inside this woman’s mind as she writes and talks. 

I couldn’t really stay with it for 250 pages, but I think this was more to do with my mood when I was reading it than the book. It’s a trip, totally unique, voicey and wild. 

In a lot of ways it is a very straightforward memoir of trans coming of age. Brookins writes about their girlhood, their fraught relationship with their parents, the ways masculinity was taught to them, the ways they took on butch identity in their teens and 20s, and the toxic masculine traits they learned/adopted when they were assembling their butch identity. They write about all the struggles they’ve had to be a Black transmasc nonbinary person in the world, coming to love themself and their body. The heart of the book is about wrestling with masculinity, unlearning toxic masculinity, and learning to build their own new masculinity unbeholden to anything they were taught. 

I really appreciated how they talked about the mistakes they made, how they perpetrated abuse, how they hurt women and people they loved in this cycle of pain and violence, as they were trying to be a man as they were taught, even when they were identifying as a butch lesbian. I found it so honest and painful to read about their past relationships and what it took for them to leave them and find healthy ways to express themself. 

I did find parts of this somewhat dry. They end a lot of chapters with these very broad political statements, like “all trans people deserve health care." Which, yes, of course, but it felt sort of…tacked on. They places where they were trying to make these grand sweeping points instead of just writing their story were less engaging. When they were just writing about what happened to them and how it felt, that’s when the memoir shone the most. Loved the poems!

This was very good and quite chilling. I would have been happier if it was twice as long. Newitz delves into the history of psychological warfare—not just disinformation and misinformation and propaganda, although all of those are part of, but the very specific ways in which the U.S. military has used it, and how the US government and various corporations and private companies and orgs now use it against US citizens. They write about how the term psychological warfare really came into common use during the Cold War, but they go much further back, talking about how the US government fostered anti-Indigenous racism during the Indian Wars using psychological warfare.

This book made me think a lot too about stories and words and language and how we use them. Stories—any stories—can be used as weapons. Newitz talks about comic books and how in the 1940s people thought comic books were destroying children and people tried to ban them. They talk about stories that can provide information or hope or help us imagine new worlds. Basically, they get into how stories can be use to further violent racist ideas and they can be used in support of movements. The essential fact is that we need to pay attention to all of this, not just know how to identify or be aware of propaganda and misinformation online, but understand the fact that stories are neutral, can be manipulated and used for all sorts of purposes, and that while they play a role in propaganda and psychological warfare, they can also play a role in justice and building a new world. They do a really good job not making generalizations like “art will save us” or “all propaganda is bad” or “poetry is about our humanity”. Instead, they make the argument that stories matter and are complex tools that shape how we understand the world, and to avoid psychological warfare we need to understand how they work. 

One thing I really love is how they talk about the idea of applied science fiction, the ways in which sci-fi and speculative writers use sci-fi as a way to explore ideas it is hard to explore in real life, and how those story laboratories, so to speak, can be then used, in various ways, to think about the real world we live in. 

The prose poems where Ewing relates a real-life experience and then twists it with a mystical/fantastical ending were brilliant and chilling. The whole collection was stunning, but those ones really took my breath away.

This is an incredible collection. I read it one sitting; it was hard to stop reading, which is not something I usually say about poetry. Of course now I want to go and read it all again. Really surprising language. Just all around amazing.

(I'm adding these reviews years later and it is so funny to me how I used to write about poetry.)

A fantastic anthology featuring a staggering array of different kinds of poems, reflecting the wide diversity of queer experience. This is a fantastic place to start if you're looking for an introduction to some of the best queer poets working today. Many (though not all) of these poets have collections that I will now be seeking out.

Beautiful and eerie. Carson uses brackets to great effect, marking where Sappho's words have been lost. It's both extraordinary and heartbreaking, reading these tiny fragments of poems. The spaces where words and lines are missing echo louder than the words that are present, sometimes. It's also just stunning to read these sharp, imaginative, and graceful lines from so long ago.

One of my favorites: "just now goldensandaled dawn"

Just an utterly breathtaking book of poetry. Smith writes about wide-ranging subjects, both vast and intimate--current events, gun violence, David Bowie, the universe and the nature of space, parenthood, race. The poems are exacting and gorgeous but also they breathe and were so easy to fall into in this really lovely way.

I listened to the audiobook, which Smith reads, and I highly recommend it. I loved hearing the weight of the words, the particular line breaks, the heft of each poem, in her voice. I know I'll want to return to it in print, so I can savor each poem, but this was a fantastic listen.