I am not a big reader of poetry so I feel quite out of my depth. These collections just feel strong though, grappling with a world full of violence against black bodies, discussing being gay, and being HIV positive. Full of moments far outside my experience and yet reading them, the ground shook. Most of all I’m going to be forever thinking about their poem Genesissy, which imagines God in the next week after the Genesis creation myth, being fierce and grieving for the way humanity will come to disparage his queer children.⁣

This book is stunning. I cry so much.

A beautiful piece of writing which tackles the interlocked issues of race and gender as they impact the characters of the performance, I definitely recommend this quick and moving read. The introduction by Shange that precedes this edition is also very informative, and it was super interesting to learn a little about the process of creating the original production.⁣

Phenomenal. I tend to struggle with both memoirs and poetry so this book took me a little while to become immersed, but when I did I fell in love. This book had me writing poems in my head about everything I've ever experienced, and dreaming about haiku. It impacted the way I see the world and myself. I want to read it again already.

This was interesting, I kept trying to read more as a novel than I think was really intended, but it was very easy to quickly go to the next and next poem. A number of these poems really stood out and stand alone as they resonated with me. I had some issues at times and others just lacked the impact of my favorites. The thing which surprised and delighted me were the drawings, which were always simple and elegant and occasionally exceptional.

Invisible Bread is hilarious in a way I can't even understand. Somehow, with his short strips of simple drawings, Boyd gets right to the heart of what I find funny. These collected works, complete with extra commentary, were a treat to read.

The premise here is really cool, but I didn't realize it was composed of such short episodic stories, and they didn't grab me as much as I hoped. I would have enjoyed it more if they were ordered chronologically, because skipping back and forth in time kept me guessing when everything was taking place. And ending in the middle of a story just feels wrong when every other story is so self contained. I also was not expecting so much nudity, which I found kind of suspect.

A fun and informative small collection of comics. Dabaie's humor is delightful, and her more serious musings are thoughtful and thought provoking.

This slim volume of short stories brilliantly blends elements of horror, feminist thought and science fiction. The tension and pacing of these stories is intense, plus I was propelled from each story to the next and rarely felt myself dragging in reacclimating, a feat many short story collections don’t achieve for me. Definitely my favorite of my recent strange speculative collection reads! Quick, strange, and completely compelling, I highly recommend to you all. ⁣⁣
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My favorite stories were Abby, an eerie and compulsive read about a woman grappling with her total lack of memory; Asja 5.0, set in a world without lust where a woman and her clone attempt to escape their ex; Passions, where an author contemplates a lost friendship and becomes obsessed with the authorship of a book she didn’t write; The Guest, in which a journalist goes to investigate a cult; and The Underworld, about a world where all books and writers have been exiled to Mars.