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A Lush and Sensual Greek Myth Retelling: The Palace of Eros by Caro de Robertis

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The Palace of Eros by Caro de Robertis cover

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It’s no secret that Anne Carson has inspired many a sapphic love affair with ancient Greek myths, or that stories like Malinda Lo’s Ash, Sarah Diemer’s The Dark Wife, and a vast world of AU fanfiction showed that the threads from which most modern myths are spun could also be woven in ways that mirrored the desires in sapphics’ hearts.

So I am delighted to review Caro de Robertis’s The Palace of Eros. A retelling of a classic Greek myth, this decidedly mature version of Eros and Psyche’s story is so beautiful in its refusal to be reductive, and so human in the ways de Robertis lets their characters be selfish, arrogant, misguided, desirous, demanding, and just messy, messy sapphics that are still capable of tender love and care. There is hurt, there is pain, but there are also two lovers coming together time and time again to work through their difficulties.

You know the bare bones of the narrative. Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty and fertility, gets peeved when people dare to compare Psyche’s mortal’s beauty to her own immortal one. So she sends Eros to force Psyche to fall in love with a monster of a man…only for Eros to end up falling for her and whisking her away to an enchanted palace. Like most Greek mythology that was translated into the English imagination by a bunch of misogynistic male aristocrats whose wealth and education came at the expense of an empire of exploitation (so, most Greek mythology), this story is ripe for the personal projection of all sorts of sexist nonsense. But in de Robertis’ capable hands, those bare bones are reincarnated into something much more caring and empathetic: a beautiful parable about the crushing weight and isolation that can come from hiding the truth of yourself, as well as the double-edged fragility of rooting your sense of self and power in physical attractiveness.

It is also a defiant, joyous, sensual ode to queer desire and passion. Living up to the title, the novel explores various aspects of the erotic throughout the POV heroines’ journey to self-actualization. I’m very pleased to say that calling this prose more wonderfully mythical than many a translation would likely make Joseph Campbell roll in his grave. So I shall. While it starts off a little choppy and takes a chapter or two to find its flow, it then becomes a nuanced take on the importance of art in developing one’s sense of expression and liberation—about the ways mistakes in safe environment leads to innovation and a better understanding of yourself and the world around you.

This isn’t some two-bit story about a femme being whisked away by a (relatively more) masc partner and then having all her problems resolved (and her character flattened) by a shower of money and/or magical prowess. This is a novel that captures how finally practicing a pottery technique to perfection can lead to the same rush of climactic satisfaction as being with an especially attentive lover. Time, focus, and care tis needed for both.

Finally, historical-esque fiction that doesn’t feel the need to fade-to-black on me! It’s not a bodice ripper, not by a long shot, but nor is de Robertis shy about showing their characters’ more carnal needs. The prose doesn’t linger too long on anatomical terms or mechanistic descriptions about what is going where exactly, instead choosing to ratchet up the sensuality through metaphor and sensory imagery that give readers strong visuals while leaving enough room for personal imaginations to get some say in the final vision.

Did I mention the absolutely poetic ways this book describes intimacy?! It’s enough to make a sapphic swoon.

But all the heartwarming lushness that blooms in isolation cannot remain forever insulated. As Psyche grows more comfortable in herself as a sensual and sensory being, her imagination expands. And as Eros grows more comfortable with the idea of being loved for all the parts once deemed monstrous, the two’s growing sense of possibility starts to chafe at the restrictions imposed by others’ petty insecurities—which themselves betray deeper anxieties about the status quo. With their families’ desire to defend the status quo they’ve sacrificed their dreams to creating violent storm clouds on the horizon, Eros and Psyche must reckon with who they want to be and become in order to keep their blossoming love alive.

In that way, it is also a timely book, and one I will recommend when people ask for something romantic, sensual, and ultimately hopeful about the way queer desire—both for others and for our truest selves— can be a catalyst for change.

Who Will Enjoy This?

  • Readers who enjoy the gentle pacing and focus on creative work in cozy fantasy but also works that grapple with the power dynamics of literary and historical conventions.
  • Readers with a deep nostalgia for femslash Greek Mythology AU fanfiction (there was some gold in those hills).
  • Readers looking for prose that fully evokes all the sensorial dimensions of the word “lush”.

The Beauty and Bitterness of Unrequited Love: The Italy Letters by Vi Khi Nao

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The Italy Letters cover

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The Italy Letters by Vi Khi Nao (August 13, 2024) reads like bitter chocolate with rich undertones that will pique the acquired tastes of readers looking for poetic experimental fiction and stories about the mid-life crises of disillusioned literary fiction writers who are not cishet white Ivy Leaguing/New Yorker men. The bitterness comes from the raw, at times desperately pained but always poetic philosophizing of Nao’s narrator, who is struggling with simultaneous financial and emotional precarities that gives rise to frequent flights of morbidity and fantasy—both of which are channeled into the letters that make up this story. The object* of these letters? A straight married woman oceans away who our narrator seems to have developed unrequited intimacy as much out of need for some stability in her life as actual lust.

These heavy sentiments are punctuated by honey-decadent sentences that treat the English language like childhood Ello sets: bending, contorting and even breaking the set pieces in order to achieve a singular vision. Nao is deliberate and thoughtful in the way she writes her narrator’s frustration with a reality that is tired, faded, exhausted by lack of money, lack of mobility, the unfulfilled promises of an American Dream that is inextricable from the American army’s violent upheaval of the ground her mother was born on and later left, fueled by the same sense of absentia that even decades later drives serial addictions and suffuses her daughter’s longing letters.

I also appreciated how Nao de-romanticized the itinerant drifter artist archetype. If white boys who criss-crossed the country in the fifties while penning pieces that earned enough (give or take a couple of trust funds or working wives) to sustain their intoxicated shenanigans were the aspirational archetype that raised generations of equally entitled, misogynistic creators, Nao’s narrator, who is itinerant less out of a sense of thrill-seeking pastoralism and more because of the failures of late-stage capitalism, is more emblematic of the current cultural moment and the creators demanding their voices be heard within it. It is, therefore, also a book about what we owe to ourselves, about women who all too often live by what we feel we owe to others—to our lovers, our family, our bosses, the people whose money puts a roof over our head and food on the table. And it’s about how these patterns can repeat even in the lives of the queerest among us—how perhaps it is precisely those furthest on the margins that are most vulnerable to this sort of harm.

Readers will like this if they are looking for:

  • fiction that is feminist and frustrated with the state of things while still being dense enough to ruminate on a re-read.
  • prose that reads like poetry that reads like parts of Naomi Klein, Barbara Ehrenreich and Jasbir Puar’s nonfiction combined into a feeling body.
  • authors that use pop culture moments as springboards to discuss the deeper emotions and anxieties swirling in the zeitgeist.
  • stories about feeling isolated and lonely even when you’re around other people, and with a realistic denouement about starting to move in a more hopeful direction.
  • stories about toxic relationships where the protagonist eventually leaves them.
  • writing about the physical experience of living in a marginalized body. Nao’s writing is a particular standout for this.

Overall, this book won’t be for everyone. It’s one of those reads that’s got a lot of (as Sianne Ngai might put it) ugly feelings that make it hard to take in a single reading (unless, like me, you got to it at the tail end of a breakup that left you with the idea that the prefab middle-class HEA and all its attendant promises of security are moving further and further out of reach with each passing day). It’s also one of those books that ends on a hopeful note, but pulls you through a maelstrom of difficult feelings before doing so, and sometimes we’re a little too up close and personal with the feeling of precarity to want to read such a clear-eyed description of inhabiting it. But The Italy Letters (which you can preorder now) is definitely a book that, perhaps in another twenty or thirty or even ten years, will become part of the broader canon of queer fiction that so quintessentially captures what it was like to live through this.

*We only ever see her as filtered through these letters, this nebulous woman who we only know by nicknames and factoids, dialogue that is never quoted and therefore can be assumed to be cut and paraphrased through the narrator’s own lens.

Content warnings: suicidal Ideation, intimate partner violence, chronic illness, abusive relationships

We Have Always Been Here: 3 Essential Historical Sapphic Reads

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As Pride Month draws to a close here in the states, here are three historical fiction books that blend insightful writing with action/adventure, twisty thriller tension, and bon-mot brilliance, respectively.

So much of history is about teaching us what has been possible, about what sorts of lives have survived, been mythologized, codified, recognized as worthy of being recorded and remembered. I hope that even as the rainbow marketing recedes from store shelves and social media logos, books like this remind us that our feelings, our intimacies, our narratives have been here long before we had singular words to encompass and categorize them.

The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye by Briony Cameron

the cover of The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye

A gritty, gripping, richly immersive story inspired by a 17th century pirate legend, Briony Cameron’s The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye rekindled an old love for adventure stories that I’ve sorely missed.

The story opens on the high seas, where our eponymous intrepid shipwright has found herself bound, wounded, and taken captive while in pursuit of her own fierce vision of freedom. It then dips back in time to show us how she got there, in the process building both a colorful portrait of the seventeenth-century Caribbean islands and a Django-esque revenge story that retains all the visceral, bloody violence of the films while adding rich dimension through a strong, fleshed-out focus on Jacquotte’s relationships with and care for her friends, crew-mates, and lovers.

You can tell how much care Cameron puts into her characters, their personalities seamlessly woven into the path of the plot and coming into focus in their interactions with others. There are no lone wolves here, no lone heroes. It takes a village to run a ship, and Jacquotte’s ascension from indentured shipwright to formidable captain is made all the sweeter by all the people she brings up with her. Honestly, this book is probably a better treatise on leadership than anything with that word in the title.

I am absolutely living for this new trend of stories that take the thrills and trappings of old-school adventure stories and repurpose those imperialist motifs and language to create detailed stories about queer women of color who’ve been kicking around and exploring this part of the world just as long as—if not longer—than the looters whose puffed-up legends formed a sizeable bit of my Early U.S. History curriculum back in high school (which was, incidentally, when I first saw the Indiana Jones movies).

Readers who want (sapphic) high-stakes adventure novels or heist stories filled with action, tension, visceral fight scenes and tender camaraderie will find a perfect text here. The care Jacquotte has for her crew and fellow downtrodden is wonderful and make the story so much more complex and emotional. I truly felt for the characters and their losses and pain, which is no small feat with such a sizeable cast and less than 400 pages.

Jacquotte is a survivor, and Cameron’s writing of her perspective is as singular and incisive as a skillfully handcrafted blade. But all her triumphs come with costs, often heavy ones.

I would caution readers about the prominence of period-specific racism in this book, though. While it always adds to the texture of the worldbuilding and serves to underscore and drive action, Cameron pulls no punches in either the language or its impact on the characters it is addressed towards.

Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkis

Spitting Gold cover

If you’re on this website, chances are you will be able to spot one of the twists the first time it is so much as hinted at. But the ones that come after are what make this book worth reading, if you’re in the mood for a propulsive, action-fueled family drama filled with unlikeable people trying their best to get ahead in the world of post-Revolution nineteenth-century France.

The first half of Carmella Lowkis’s Spitting Gold feels like a bog-standard historical romance before spinning wildly into a great spooky beach read. Readers who enjoy stories about spiritualism and mediums’ lives beyond the performance will find a highly original work in this genre, with an intriguing, morally ambiguous story unfurling in the background of the séance scenes.

This book gives all the satisfaction of creepy metaphysical shenanigans in shadowy dark corners with the added satisfaction of girls kissing (though not much else). More of those beachy horror movies should have girls kissing, imo.

While there are some echoes of Sara Waters’s iconic Fingersmith in this story, it felt more like a cross between Libba Bray and Patricia Highsmith’s work, with the sort of reader-friendly and detailed worldbuilding of the former. Spitting Gold is shorter than most of the aforementioned authors’ novels, which means less room for Waters-style interpersonal studies, and a more focused cast than Bray’s larger series. The romance is not the focus, but the sapphics drive the plot in large measure.

Gothic lit purists might find themselves disappointed, however. This book is far more character focused than atmospheric, driven by the narrative more than metaphor or symbolism, in a way that might not entirely satisfy people looking for something that hews more closely to genre and Du Maurier. It’s not quite as liminal or focused on houses as metaphors, is what I’m saying.

And while I enjoy reading about people whose somewhat understandable worst impulses drive their actions, not everyone does. This book goes deeper into what vices resentment and loathing can breed. It is uncomfortable at times, but in a way that feels narratively consistent. Readers who want their sapphics relatively non problematic, or at the very least not explicitly spiteful, be forewarned.

On the Edge: 100 Years of Hindi Fiction on Same-Sex Desire edited and translated by Ruth Vanita

On the Edge cover

There’s a line from Tressie McCottom’s excellent essay collection where she writes about beauty, respectability and “self-definition masquerad[ing] as a notion of loving our black selves in white terms.”

All too often, stories that attempt to write queer people back into the histories that colonialism, racism, and other schemes of systemic violence have erased them from are met with the criticism that our use of English terms to describe our particular position on the spectrums of sexuality and/or gender is a capitulation to the colonizer’s pen, a sign that queerness itself is an import with no place in the indigenous culture(s). We’re told our love makes us instruments of colonial violence, even as vestigial colonial laws and mores are used to persecute and intimidate LGBTQ+ folks the world over.

Ruth Vanita’s latest transliterated collection is a joyful, vibrant refutation of those rootless exemplars of the bigoted rot that pervades even these postcolonial spaces and places. Queer feeling is the focus of each story in On the Edge. Though the characters (and likely even their writers) would not use or identify with the adjectives or archetypal narratives that suffuse our modern movie and streaming screens, their writing reveals what it means to feel queerly: to experience desire in shapes that aren’t reflected on silver screens, in post-colonial histories (all the stories in the collection were written in the 20th century), or even many family genealogies, overshadowed as they are by an overwhelming majority of heteronormative ones.

There’s so much emphasis on feeling here, it’s remarkable. To read these stories is to be transported into the singular minds of their protagonists and their conflicted, sometimes confounding actions. There are also an abundance of rich, novel metaphors that will appeal to language-loving literary fiction readers. It’s such a lovely cross-section, with stories that range from countryside comedies of manners with echoes of both Sanskrit plays and British holiday farces, to turbulent urban dramas located entirely in the mind of a woman possessed by unrequited passions. It would make a lovely gift for certain Hindi-lit-loving near and dear ones—the syntax and rhythm of Vanita’s English transliterations achingly reminded me of the R.K. Narayan and Munshi Premchand collections my grandparents used to gift me.

I was particularly delighted by the editor’s own story, “Vision”. It reminded me a lot of what I loved in Theodore McCombs’s 2023 short fiction collection—namely, the intimacies and awareness that can open up as we move through our preconceived notions about respectability and desire. I was moved to tears by this collection, by the concrete connection it offered me to a legacy that close friends and I have mostly had to cobble together through whispers and Wikipedia stubs.

I included this collection alongside the other novels because these three books seek, in their own ways, to put queer people back into the history of iconic periods that persist in the cultural imaginations: the Golden Age of Piracy, the spiritualism movement, and rapidly urbanizing post-colonial India. Each of these books takes familiar character concepts—the brutal captain, the scheming medium, the moralizing busybody—and allows us to participate in the (often ahistorical, mostly fiction-filtered) nostalgia these stories invoke.

#historical fiction #pirates #seances #mystery #adventure #history #literary fiction #annan #caribbean #india #lesbian

Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words by Boel Westin, translated by Silvester Mazzarella

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Tove Jansson by Boel Westin cover

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A queer, iconoclast, anti-fascist, anti-war comic artist, and joyfully adventurous woman, the Tove Jansson brought to life by Boel Westin’s considered pen is a complicated, innovative creative in resolute pursuit of independence—in both her art and romances.

Meticulously researched but rarely dry, this is a book for Moomin fans and art history lovers alike. It provides a deep look into both the personal life and recorded experiences of Tove Jansson, as well as the historical circumstances that gave rise to her singular artistic vision—which was, it turns out, far more oriented towards painting than illustration.*

While the book focuses more on literary-minded analysis of Jansson’s illustrations (including examining the events that inspired them, namely her formative experiences in the wake of the first world war and under the shadow of the second) than the technical aspects (past a chapter dedicated to her years at art school), its cross-sectional look at the cultures of the particular artistic milieus she inhabited during her life helps provide further insight into her inspirations.

There’s a sincere affection for her subject in Westin’s writing, but it never reads as overly fawning or glamorizing. Readers will feel like they’re walking through a gallery, looking through windows at an artist as she grows through painstaking practice and experience.

One of the loveliest things about biographies is that they remind us how we’re not alone.** Sometimes what becomes globally iconic starts off humble, and critically panned. Westin doesn’t shy away from Jansson’s early struggles, and it’s that grounding that makes what could easily become a fairytale-style homily to creative perseverance—she lived and worked in a literal tower for most of her life—into something much more real.

As a kid, I was obsessed with the Moomin books. The soft, rounded shapes were so tactile in my mind’s eye, and the stories had this sense of being about something bigger and just a teensy smidge darker than they immediately let on. Returning to that world decades later, I’ve found myself bookmarking some of the pages to revisit when I need a bit of a pick-me-up regarding my own aspirations. Westin’s elaboration of Jansson’s ambitions and struggles will likely hold meaning for modern creatives, illustrators in particular. The book does not shy from going into frank detail on Jansson’s need for financial independence to pursue her singular vision, and her later efforts to maintain control of how her art was presented, particularly once the popularity of the Moomin books brought an avalanche of possible licensing deals down on her doorstep. The descriptions of her fierce dedication to preserving her integrity as a creator are inspiring. Even as Jansson’s whimsy is celebrated here, so too is her ambition in equal measure.

In summary, this biography shines a light on the human behind the characters, and her love of compassionate, thoughtful, boundary-pushing stories on the page and in her own life. While it clocks in at nearly 500 pages, it’s well worth checking out if you want to read about:

  • Biographies of sapphic artists
  • Biographies of sapphic comic artists/illustrators
  • Biographies that humanize their subjects through detailed study
  • The history behind the Moomin books
  • The way art is both deeply individual and a reflection of the world the artist inhabits
  • Post-war European art outside of the more well-trodden English-French perspective: Next time someone asks me if I’m familiar with Francis Bacon, I’m asking them if they’re familiar with Tove Jansson.

You can now order the book from the University of Minnesota Press!

Footnotes:

*Reading this book gave me new appreciation for the 2020 biopic Tove, which focuses on her life and career just before the first Moomin books really took off. It’s a delightful homage to her passion for painting, too, as well as earlier romantic partnerships that this websites’ readers might not know as well as the one with Tuulikki Pietilä. It’s streaming now on Kanopy, for anyone interested.

**As Jansson’s diary entries reveal, it appears that queer horror-loving women are not a recent phenomenon!

Queer Smuggler-Duggery: Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco

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Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco cover

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(Note: This book is a sequel but can be enjoyed without reading the previous one)

Fans of historical fiction with high-stakes hijinks and well-developed human characters with strong internal compasses can rejoice! Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco opens on the early days of organized labor and careens headlong into a riveting world of gunfights, train heists, and scheming smuggler-duggery that doesn’t let up on its deeply immersive historicism for the next 300+ pages.

The first page also features this gem of a quote “Alma Rosales is sweating through every layer of the men’s clothes she calls home”.

The main POV character is said Alama Rosales, an unrepentant, fiercely loyal bisexual who has realized that a man’s persona suits her appetites and ambitions far better than skirts ever did. She’s a former member of the Pinkertons (Women’s Division) who long ago traded in that history for a chance to reinvent herself as hardened, hardscrabble stevedore and opium smuggler “Jack Camp”. That hard-earned equilibrium is disturbed when dead bodies begin to show up in unlikely places, attracting a figure from her past with secrets Alma would rather not face, and another from the ever-encroaching future she has to, sooner or later.

As the history and progress collide in the frontier harbor she’s come to call home, Alma is forced to confront exactly how far she’s willing to go to preserve everything she’s built on the unforgiving shore of Tacoma, 1888.

Rough Trade is at times a brilliantly twisty thriller, a tightly-examined glimpse into life on the early edge of American mythmaking, and a roustabout adventure that centers the people who kept the economy going both above and below the board and the table at the turn of the twentieth century. It is grounded in those realities, and the spaces socioeconomic marginalization made for all the aching beauty and equally fraught compromises that accompanied then-outlawed queer desires. In that way, it is also a heartfelt book and an unromantic one, about the freedom that comes from connecting to people who see you for yourself, in the risks of getting lost in a persona but also everything that can be gained when a fiction allows you to reveal who you want to be so bad you can taste it in your dreams. 

There is something uncompromising about the way Carrasco’s characters exist. I appreciated how they feel lived-in, like real people saying and doing what they think will bring them closer to their desires—and whose plans must change shape when those desires do, too. Identities in Carrasco’s vision of the Wild West are adaptable, craftable, at times malleable. They serve as shields, comforts, and weapons, all with a keen understanding of how they can be used in service of their wielders’ all-pervading wants. It felt like a breath of fresh air to delve so deeply into the negotiations and nuances of this story, and I strongly recommend it to readers who enjoy rollicking, tightly-plotted adventures with strong characterization.

Who Will Enjoy This?

  • People who want queer characters that rival the most ruffianish of cads historical fiction has ever conjured
  • People who really, really miss the feeling of reading a Sherlock Holmes story for the first time and want to revisit it at book length.
  • People who want Canada to be something other than a beacon of shining enlightenment FOR ONCE, lol.
  • People who really, really enjoy morally ambiguous queers guided by their own inner compass (even if the needle is a little/lot crooked)
  • People who want a period-accurate piece on gender nonconformity and queer life.

I can’t stress that last part enough. A book with period-accurate takes on gender-nonconformity and queer desire.

Who Might Think Twice?

  • People who want more focus on sapphic steam and intimacy than whatever the dudes are doing. There’s a lot more guy on guy (or genderfluid-masc on guy) action in these pages than explicit sapphic content, fyi. Lots of sapphic yearning, but I fully understand anyone who is tired of reading about that and wants period-accurate five-chili-rating reads. You won’t find that here but for one scene. It is a delightful scene, though, and very bittersweet in context.
  • People who want HEAs for all their queer characters. Or all the characters they become emotionally invested in.
  • People who don’t like unresolved character arcs. This is actually the second book in a series, not that I knew that going in…

Content warnings: murder, violence, drug use

Sapphic Slice of Life in Pastels: Rainbow! Vol. 1 by Sunny & Gloom

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the cover of Rainbow Vol 1

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Boo is a high schooler who likes cute outfits, daydreaming, and also the new girl at school (maybe). New girl Mimi—with her wild mint-colored mane, low tolerance for sleazy douchebags, and modern-day chivalry —seems like the perfect “prince” to give Boo the whirlwind high-school romance of her dreams. Much to her frustration, though, Boo isn’t a shoujo main character. She’s a teenager who’s busy trying to help pay the bills and save herself from her mother’s ceaseless string of poor decisions. But with a little help, our bright-but-beleaguered protagonist might finally have a shot at some kind of happy.

Rainbow! Vol 1 is a heartfelt, sincere story that tackles some difficult, darker themes while never sacrificing either its sense of emotional grounding or first-love butterflies*. I have a weakness for the gentle comedy of kindly awkward characters being awkwardly kind to each other, and let me tell you, this has that in spades.

I also have a weakness for pastels and soft lines (Steven Universe backgrounds live rent-free on my laptop and phone screens to this day). The pink-mint-heliotrope scheme of the comic is soothing on the eyes, sweet on the sensibilities and so cute that I finally understood the literal meaning of “kawaii“.

And speaking of Steven Universe, the art style exudes Cartoon Network vibes, with a splash of shoujo and Erica Henderson-esque elements that will hit older readers right in their nostalgia sweet spot. It certainly did for me.

I’ve been following this on Tapas for a while, where you can read ahead if the ending leaves you wanting more. In particular, I appreciate how the readers can find a lifeline in the budding relationship between Boo and Mimi when the storyline takes a turn for the heavier—much like Boo herself is beginning to. No matter how rough things get, that hope is like the rainbow at the end of the storm.

Overall, this is a sweet sapphic slice-of-life story centered around two high schoolers trying to figure out who they are outside of the expectations imposed on them, and maybe falling in love in the process.

Content Warnings for bullying, parental neglect and substance abuse

*Fans of Heartstopper will definitely find a lot to love here, but if I, personally, had to draw a graphic novel comparison, I’d say it reads something like if Emile Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters switched out the horror for shoujo-ai and the adult audience for YA readers. It might seem like an odd comparison, but the complicated family dynamics, treatment of tropes as a source of comfort, and handling of the way Boo’s fantasia act as a slipstream lens through which she copes with reality and her feelings of alienation all reminds me of Ferris’s iconic work.

A Memoir of Medical Bias—Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir by Walela Nehanda

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the cover of Bless the Blood

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Bless The Blood: A Cancer Memoir is a striking book that gets under your skin and stays there for days afterward. Though billed as a YA book, the writing and story hold a depth of feeling and insight that will engage far older readers, too. Hospitals, homes, intimate relationships and even one’s own skin are explored as sites playing host to complex histories. Framed by references to Cynthia Parker Ohene and Audre Lorde, Walela Nehanda threads a poetics of class, race and gender that shows how those constructs tangibly mediate who has access to certain spaces and their attendant expectations of care.

There is wisdom in Nehanda’s depiction of the ways relationships function as spaces for the people in them. And inversely, how spaces are shaped by the connections people make there. Some books really get to the heart of that old saying “a house is not a home”—this is one of the few that goes further by suggesting that a body isn’t always a home, either.

Teeming with generational trauma and an aching love-hunger that breaks through in paragraphs and poems about sickness, recovery, affection, intimacy, and history, this is a book that refuses to be reducible to inspiration porn. There is a lot of unvarnished pain here: it beats and seeps and leaps out of the page, sinking into the sorest parts of anyone who has ever found themselves at odds with their body, anyone who has ever felt the acute violence of having their bodies treated as alienable. 

But these recollections are accompanied by memories of healing and true connection that remind me of one of my favorite aspects of queer media: the defiance of portraying communal moments of revelry and unapologetic joy. These moments offer a small antidote to the seemingly incessant indignities Nehanda encounters in trying to access care through institutions that diminish compassion into a sort of charity contingent on the seeker’s performance of acceptable respectable acquiescence to unjust norms. It is a keenly relevant story, and only becoming more so as the conversation and activism around medical bias gains momentum.

The book’s archetypal figures and icons are also from a media moment that younger readers (I’m including twenty-somethings in this), will find timely. Close readers might be left wondering why there is more “prestige” in the exploits of long-dead hellenics than Captain American or Black Panther—and how our insistence on pretending that the former are more universal than the latter only goes to show how deeply those stories have been decontextualized in service of modern myths about what is “natural” or just.

I will admit fully that I am very partial to this sort of mythic deconstruction. I appreciate authors who staunchly refuse the opiate of presumed objectivity and instead fiercely reckon with the implicit messages and specificity of our shared stories. There is a passion in these pages that I found refreshing, and which I hope this review does justice to.

Who Will Enjoy This: People who thought The Remedy was poignant, timely and want to read more deeply personal stories about the struggles of accessing care (both medical and otherwise) as a gender-expansive person of color (here, a Black person in America). People who enjoy memoirs in verse, or poetry about the poet’s relationship with their body and others. People who think “formalism” is another word for “limitation”. People who enjoy science fiction metaphors for biomedical ideas.

(Seriously, Nehanda’s description of leukemia and their body as a besieged planet is all I’ve been talking about to anyone who will listen for the past week)

Who Might Think Twice: If you’re currently dealing with healthcare bias and difficulties of your own, this book will either reassure you that you are not alone or leave you emotionally exhausted. Your miles may vary. Nehanda pulls no punches in either their remembrances of or their viscerally unflinching depiction of their pain.

Decadence and Decay: Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, translated by Heather Cleary

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the cover of Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk

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Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, translated by Heather Cleary (March 5, 2024) is a considered, sorrowful, masterfully atmospheric story about mourning and the costs of surviving outside of society’s protective frameworks. It is also the story of two women in conflict with their inherited and inherent longings around family, companionship and intimacy—one from the past and one from sometime like our present.

Echoes of old-school gothic—in the vein of Rachilde or Poe—permeate Yuszczuk’s prose. And much like those bygone writers, her story is one that poetically captures the complicated moralities of relationships entangled in sociopolitical and material histories.

This is not a vampire romance in the modern sense. The seductions are married to viscera-spilling violence, the decadence marred by decay*, and a sense of bated unsettlement lingers over both the streets and lives our first narrator moves through in her quest for survival. Though she has centuries of experience, she is not immune to the same vices she exploits in others, and is in turn refreshingly slow to condemn them.

The second narrator is much less glamorous. A recent divorcee who’s barely coping with her mother’s terminal illness and hospitalization, our second narrator is struggling but refuses to admit that her white-knuckling isn’t sustainable. That she cannot go on as she always has, that relationships cannot continue in a state of suspended animation. While the past is punctuated by conclusive events and deaths, the present lingers—plastic flowers and medical equipment keep memories alive past well-meaning. We feel the narrator’s frustration, her alienation and desperation and heartache.

I enjoyed the narrators’ lack of hypocrisy and abundance of interiority. I also appreciated how the novel retains all of their dark and stylistic delight, without the aching inconclusiveness or censor-friendly endings of its pulpy and gothic paperback predecessors—even if the title and cover art are practically begging for an appositive colon.

It’s a clever title, and a colloquial pun. But Yuszczuk’s novel complicates the construction of lust as a base instinct on par with hunger or titular thirst. Lust, desire, eroticism and art are all defiant distractions from the inevitable, and their fulfillment requires the sort of communication and connection that those most basic activities do not.

The second half deals more with grief and more clearly reveals veins of Sheridan Le Fanu’s influence. Some of the scenes reminded me of reading Carmilla for the first time. The tension, the confusion, the delicate language building into bloody, sensual intimacy that is hardly explicit but unquestionably erotic.

Thirst is the sort of book that benefits from second reading or a slow first one. It’s not heavy-handed, but it would be a rich digestif to Gilbert and Gubar’s 1979 opus—and is more than a little likely to appeal to fans of that book. While most of the women’s anxieties are tangible and described in grounded detail, their phantastic responses (as well as the ways wealth, privilege, generational fears and architecture are represented) squarely situate this work within the gothic tradition. I also take this as a historical win— we’re past the period when “hysteria” was a valid diagnosis and when women had to veil lived traumas under layers of metaphor.

As with most translated literature, particularly ones that are heavily descriptive, subtly humorous, or in conversation with historical works, there is a chance that a little something may have been lost in translation. And while I haven’t yet read the original, I can attest that Heather Cleary’s translation maintains a lush, tactile lyricism that swept me into the history, even when the perspective was contemporary enough to reference the recent Coronavirus pandemic. 

The vibes were, to put it succinctly, immaculate.

Content warnings: violence, euthanasia

*Some might argue that the close juxtaposition of decay only heightens decadence by contrast. I personally feel that it’s more about how people seek out beauty and small pleasures even in dreary circumstances, but you do you.

Piercingly Insightful Poetry: The Delicacy of Embracing Spirals by Mimi Tempestt

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the cover of The Delicacy of Embracing Spirals by Mimi Tempestt

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From the epigraph to the end, this book is clear-eyed about its aims and its author’s perspective. Tempestt’s writing draws the reader in as a participant, with mentions of readers, watchers, audiences that are not confrontational, but certainly not abstracted. Reading this collection felt like watching spoken word, or another kind of embodied performance. Even their most numinous ideas are tangible, and felt within the reader’s body. This sort of experience can become consumptive, but Tempestt’s lyrical acknowledgement of these possible dynamics means the close reader has to interrogate their own relationship to the text.

What are the boxes offered to you, and what becomes of you when you cannot fit, contort yourself to fit, or decide to totally reimagine the presumed binary of these interactions entirely? It’s like those Barbara Kruger pieces—what do you hope art will do for you even when, especially when, it’s not a mirror?

Tempestt adds to that conversation, questioning how the commodification of artists’ pain and grief perpetuates power dynamics, and reflects entrenched values that prioritize certain approaches over other, equally poignant but under-published ones.

She understands the demands of performance acutely, intimately, and expresses them with a beautiful poeticism. The deforming weight of others demands and needs—both the explicitly coercive and the more implicit, insidious sorts that can arise in intimate relationships and workplaces and alike—are all rendered here. But it is not a bleak work. The poems are full of anger, frustration, also strength, joyful reminiscence, and even a sort of timeless expansiveness in the titular one.

I hesitate to use the word “metaphysical” because it conjures up the sort of philosopher-types whose practices and philosophies are shot through with the sort of categorical essentialism that does not necessarily align with this work’s core spiral symbolism. Or the synecdochal head-shop proprietor whose commercial enterprise’s interiors have sensorially co-opted incense from the practices of currently colonized faiths. But it is either that or the word “transcendental,” and personal connotative grievances aside, there is a sense of something magical in Tempestt’s verse. It is grounded, but there is also something more beneath that earth.

Death and discontent can become defanged when broken into art. But Tempestt’s writing keeps its edges, its piercing-flesh insights. The last piece, a short immersive play, was one of my favorites. The prose was incisive, with both the violence and precision of a fine scalpel, cutting through thick skin and protective coverings to reveal something visually red and viscerally tender. 

All that said, I’ve always been drawn to the ambiguousness of poetry, where the interpretation often says as much about the reader as the creator. It can be a site for shared understandings, or one that clearly demarcates the reader’s alienation from the emotional truths of the poet. 

This collection was engaging, clever, poetic and expressive. I strongly recommend it to people who enjoy formally-unconstrained but deftly shaped poetry with word-playfulness that seamlessly maintains its heft and intensity.

A Tender Sapphic Graphic Novel Romance: If You’ll Have Me by Eunnie

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the cover of If You'll Have Me

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If You’ll Have Me is a very tender, very human story about two women with their own baggage who realize that sharing the burden often makes it easier to bear.

Both Momo and PG have been unlucky in love, and their first meet-awkward hardly seems poised to change that. But as they spend more time together, their feelings and blush-strokes both begin to deepen.

It was refreshing to read a sapphic romance set in a college setting. As I get older, I’ve found myself gravitating towards stories with women who have come through the gauntlet of adolescence only to find they still have a lot of learning and growing to still do. I’ve also met more women who didn’t have their first relationships in high school, in undergrad, or until they started working. It is nice to see those stories get told, too—especially with such lovely artwork! Every panel, even the bluest, is so suffused with warmth. The color palette and linework are probably some of my favorites in recent memory. While the aesthetic influences are pretty clear, the art style also has its own unique signifiers.

I appreciated how the importance of communication was explored in this story. The different inter-character relationships are well written, and handled with warmth and sincerity while not shying away from the conflicts that can arise from good intentions. We see how Momo and PG interact with friends, family, and how those dynamics shape their interactions with each other. We get to know their support networks, their social habits, and this makes their private moments all that much more textured.

One of my favorite aspects of this story was the emphasis on showing rather than telling, which comics as a combined visual and written medium are uniquely suited to. Some of the conversations are just as shaped by what is not said as what is, and the panels where we see PG with her family do this beautifully. There is a weight behind their words, whole histories being considered in the spaces between the panels.