Reviews

Coming Out Like a Porn Star – ed. Jiz Lee

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The declaration that “sex sells” is not to be taken lightly at all—nor the labor of the industry’s workers.

Queer Palestine – Pinko Collective

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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

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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

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[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.

Ordinary Devotion – Kristen Holt-Browning

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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

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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.

Shadow of My Shadow – Jennifer Doyle

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Doyle turns to literature to imagine an idyllic world where complaints are taken seriously.

Nerves Between Song – Geoffrey Olsen

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Even as human exceptionalism and capitalist greed threaten the survival of “other worlds,” life manages to return amid the ruins.

Glass Jaw – Raisa Tolchinsky

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In Raisa Tolchinsky’s take on Dante’s INFERNO, we are ushered into hell not by Virgil but by a chorus of female boxers.

Reservoir Bitches – Dahlia de la Cerda

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In a country that has one of the world’s highest femicide rates, an irreverent tongue works as an imperfect, slapdash shield.