The situation seemed ripe for mining a precious metal known as “poignancy,” the urgency of the [writers’] strong desires to fulfill their ambitions and the wrenching back of that desire in the form of rejection.
Queer Palestine – Pinko Collective
Small but immensely valuable, Queer Palestine dispenses with dangerous narratives about sexuality in Palestine while shining a light on the everyday forms of queer life and anticolonial politics that persist against all odds.
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear – Mosab Abu Toha
This collection echoes the despair, resilience, and righteous anger felt in Palestine. Toha writes with simple syntax and diction, weaving in metaphors and unsaid emotions that cry out loud and clearly.
Health and Safety – Emily Witt
[Witt] highlights with clinical detachment the ways in which a scene, like a relationship, can become so comfortably obliterating that it takes something seismic—a global pandemic, or maybe a neighborhood rezoning—to shake us from its grip.
The story that we tell of the body is so often something given to us by other people. A lot of queer fairy tales and queer myths explore rewriting these narratives of bodily identity and ownership, or the gaps between physical and felt body.
Ordinary Devotion – Kristen Holt-Browning
ORDINARY DEVOTION is an original work on the ancient and current theme of women’s desire for respect in a society that often devalues them.
The Obscene Bird of Night – José Donoso
Donoso poses the same question to the novel form that he poses to the aristocracy: What is the monstrosity that beauty and order are trying to suppress? We enter a novel where timelines are hopelessly confused, boundaries between characters are thin to the point of nonexistence, dark magic abounds.
The Native American Horror Story (video essay)
Blending a cultural story and creating something new with it can be good or bad, depending on who’s telling the story and who’s in charge of the narrative.
Tiffany Morris & Jessica Johns
We obviously had a relationship to this land, and the fact that it’s a city now doesn’t change that I have a relationship to how land operates here. Even though cities are colonial and cities are devouring land, I still have a relationship to what exists here.
Shadow of My Shadow – Jennifer Doyle
Doyle turns to literature to imagine an idyllic world where complaints are taken seriously.