Reviewed by Asam Ahmad Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Random House, 2019), 368 pp., $28.00. In his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the poet Ocean Vuong creates scenes of magisterial beauty through a heartfelt and earnest exploration of grief, desire, pain, and...
Reviewed by Jeremiah Bartram When I opened Me, Myself, They, I knew nothing about Joshua M. Ferguson. I didn’t know that as a political activist they had pioneered policy changes in Ontario and B.C. that now permit non-binary gender identification on birth certificates and driver’s licenses...
Reviewed By Evelyn Deshane There are several moments in Little Fish by Casey Plett where the protagonist, Wendy, tells the readers that she always envisioned herself as more of a woman when she thought of her body from the back. This is a really queer thing to say–as in the original meaning...
Reviewed by Rebecca Snow I came out while reading Greetings from Janeland: Women Write More About Leaving Men for Women, edited by Candace Walsh and Barbara Straus Lodge. It’s the 2017 sequel to Dear John, I Love Jane, which was released in 2010. I hadn’t read the first book when I read...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad The strange beauty and terrifying brilliance of Carmen Maria Machado’s first short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, cannot be overstated. These stories foreshadow and tap into the current cultural conversations around the prevalence and banality of everyday...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane If I could sum up jayy dodd’s poetry anthology A Portrait in Blues in a phrase, it would be “so many, too much.” This utterance is my attempt to put words to a feeling that is—by the nature of feeling itself—transient, which is what many of the poets try...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane Quarry by Tanis Franco hits all of my major interests: poetry written from a gender nonconforming / queer perspective, focused in a Canadian locale, and peppered with numerous references to literary theories, along with pop culture. Oh, and in all of this, these poems are...
Reviewed by Annick MacAskill Joelle Barron’s poetry collection Ritual Lights is an impressive and engaging debut that centres experiences of sexual assault, loss, love, and parenthood in a lyric narrative sequence. The book opens with a series of poems that explore sexual violence and family...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane A black hole infiltrates much of The Videofag Book, a collection edited by William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill about their time running the Videofag art space in Kensington Market, Toronto. Comprising an introduction by Tannahill and Ellis, a roundtable conversation, love...
Review By Asam Ahmad Near the end of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy’s first new novel in twenty years, we find this passage jotted in a characters’ notebook: How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything. It is an awkward fragment...
Reviewed by Trevor Corkum Building Fires in the Snow took me for a jaunt down memory lane. When I was a university student, I spent a couple of summers working in the Yukon. I hitchhiked the Alaska Highway with a friend, arriving in Whitehorse seven days after we first stuck out our thumbs in the...
Reviewed by Gwen Benaway Joshua Whitehead’s debut collection of poetry, full-metal indigiqueer, is a cyberpunk dystopian vision of modern queer Indigenous life. Influenced by the classic Japanese anime Akira, full-metal indigiqueer is one of the most distinctive and original collections of...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane I read Subject to Change: Trans Poetry and Conversation, edited by H. Melt, while on a train going to a conference. Not only did nearly all of these poems mention the restlessness that travel provokes, making it the perfect companion, but the work of these five trans...
Review by Asam Ahmad Written and directed by Maysaloun Hamoud, the film In Between is a daring and hilarious portrayal of the lives of three Palestinian women living in Tel Aviv. The film is remarkable for its deft weaving of light-hearted sentimentality with searing multi-layered explorations of...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane I read Kay Gabriel’s Elegy Department Spring in a coffee shop—which, looking back on my experience, seems to be the perfect place to read a poetry chapbook about the life and art of Candy Darling, a trans actress famous for her work in Andy Warhol’s...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane Meanwhile, Elsewhere, a sci-fi and fantasy collection edited by Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett, begins with a story about a trans woman who miraculously becomes pregnant after a womb transplant without having intercourse, thereby making her the new Virgin Mary in a...
Reviewed by Rachna Contractor Novels by and about queer South Asians in North America will never be what I want them to be; SJ Sindu’s debut novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, helped me let go of all expectation. Set within a comfortably middle-class community outside Boston and filled with...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane About halfway through my PhD comprehensive exams, I hit a wall. My reading list was composed of transgender literary works, meaning that I was reading autobiography after autobiography. As I took notes on these books, I began to wonder how long it would take until people...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad In Scarborough, Catherine Hernandez’s new novel, a cacophony of voices intermingles to create a unique portrait of the many disparate communities that make up one of the largest and poorest suburbs in Canada. Hernandez carefully weaves many different characters from many...
Reviewed by Michael Lyons One of the most arresting exchanges in Patricia Highsmith’s Carol (originally published as The Price of Salt under a pseudonym) is not with the titular love interest of protagonist Therese Belivet, but with Mrs. Ruby Robichek, a sweater saleswoman at a Manhattan...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad In her new book Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, Jane Ward makes a compelling and fascinating argument about the significance and role of sex between straight white men as a requisite ingredient that solidifies their masculinity, their sense of manhood, and most...
Reviewed By Evelyn Deshane Perhaps it was because I had finished reading Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates that I had already been thinking of bodies and how they moved in the world before starting Kai Cheng Thom’s a place called No Homeland. Her first poetry collection conjures...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane During an interview with Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, Laura Jane Grace addressed the title of her recent memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, released in 2016. Her response to Noah was similar to her response on The Late...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad In Nick Comilla’s Candyass, a novel that stops tasting sweet about halfway through, an adolescent punk kid from a small town in Pennsylvania narrates his sexual coming of age and various experiences with gay life in Montreal and New York City. Purporting to be a novel that...
Reviewed by Latonya Pennington In C.B. Lee’s Not Your Sidekick, Jessica Tran is a non-superpowered teenager who just wants to live up to her superhero lineage. Despite not having powers, she decides to take a paid internship and work for her city’s most notorious supervillain in order...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane When I teach poetry to my first-year students, they often don’t know what to say. As a genre, poetry seems to be too old, too stiff and formal, or too cavalier and obscene—depending on what student I poll that day. The only other genre that seems as contentious is...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad A sprawling, expansive memoir that spans two continents and bridges different worlds in the process, Daisy Hernández’s A Cup of Water under My Bed revels in the complexities and the chaos of the queer immigrant experience. This is a book that refuses easy answers and...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad In Him, Me, Muhammad Ali, her new collection of short stories, Randa Jarrar tackles themes of longing, infidelity, betrayal, and desire, themes the Palestinian-American novelist, translator, and essayist introduced in her first novel, A Map of Home. The stories in this...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad If all poets hope to occasionally make the ineffable speak, Ocean Vuong does so effortlessly in almost every poem from his new collection of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. It’s hard not to become undone reading many of these poems, and you may find that something...
Reviewed by Gwen Benaway Published by Metonymy Press in 2016, Kai Cheng Thom’s first book is titled Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir. The title should be enough to signal to readers that what follows is a conflated narrative of personal...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s new collection of poetry, There Should Be Flowers, is beautiful and needs to be read by everyone. This collection explores our cultural anxieties around body, memory and space without ever falling into a clichéd romanticism or idealism...
Reviewed by K. Astre Joe Okonkwo’s lyrical, sensual, and sensory debut novel Jazz Moon is an intimate look into twenty-one-year-old Benjamin Charles’s timid yet determined metamorphosis into a man bold enough to honour his deepest desires. Readers watch as he reluctantly reconciles himself...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad Near the beginning of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, one of the main characters witnesses his roommate in physical pain. Instead of trying to comfort his friend, he goes to the bathroom to start tidying up, waiting for the pain to subside: “he did what they had all...
Reviewed by Latonya Pennington Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Córdova is a fantasy-fiction story about Alejandra Mortiz, a bruja who comes from generations of witches. Alejandra, however, hates magic and wants to be a normal teenager. In an attempt to remove her powers during a ceremonial Deathday...
Reviewed by Latonya Pennington Published in 2014, Drag Noir is an anthology edited by K.A. Laity for Fox Spirit Books. It is also the third in a series of anthologies focused on Noir. Most of the contributors, including the editor, are on the LGBTQ+ spectrum and are successful speculative fiction...
Reviewed by Gwen Benaway Published in 2016, Jia Qing Wilson-Yang’s Small Beauty is a debut novel that explores family connections and the legacy of racism. The narrative’s central character is a young mixed-race transwoman retracing her family history back through generations while living in...
Reviewed by Gwen Benaway Published in 2016, even this page is white is Vivek Shraya’s first book of poetry. She is already an accomplished and award-winning prose writer as well as a musician, photographer, videographer, and artist. Her entry into poetry marks other transformations in her...
Reviewed by Sugar le Fae In Sideshow Concessions, Lucas Crawford writes fearless, shameless poetry, born, no doubt, from a lifetime of fear and shame. This is the rare alchemy of Crawford’s writing—no binary is safe (or distinct) from its perceived opposite, no genre or gender unbendable...
Reviewed by Salma Saadi “I’ve read the Qu’ran, and I know the passages you’re referring to. None of them clearly condemns homosexuality.” Does Islam really forbid homosexuality? Can you be gay and still be a practising Muslim? To some, this may sound absurd, but these are some of the...
Reviewed by Casey Plett “I never thought love was real. I didn’t. And now I think life isn’t real without it———that sounds like a really bad greeting card—” “—Don’t. Don’t make it a joke.” —Comet If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo is a great book, which is nice...
