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...
Reviewed by Malaika Alex Leslie’s The Things I Heard about You is an experiment in language, editing, and meaning. The book of poems is divided into thirteen sections. Each section begins with a prose piece that Leslie edits down into a single phrase and in one case, just one word: “Thumbprint.”...
Reviewed by Adam Holman In Andy Sinclair’s debut novel Breathing Lessons, he writes about how people “should do what they want,” whether in hookups or matters of the heart. We are forced to contemplate the repercussions, and Sinclair guides us with a precise assurance, taking us, along with its...
Reviewed by Vivek Shraya Beldan Sezen’s new graphic novel, Snapshots of a Girl, opens with this definition of coming out: “The decision to step out of the unseen, the unspoken, the unnamed. Telling others, loved ones, dear ones, about one’s so-called ‘sexual preferences’ … something you know...
by Kennedy Ryan The latest Apple software update included a patch that fixed what many users had long seen as a glaring oversight: the lack of same-sex couples with which users could express themselves. The previous “People” category on the emoji keyboard had only included straight couples...
by Adèle Barclay In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson crafts a new kind of text, an exploratory vessel, out of philosophy, theory, art criticism, and memoir to house discussions of motherhood, transitioning, queer family, romance. An innovative work that is exacting and enthralling, The Argonauts...
by Matt Loney Alternating between Ameera, a sexually adventurous resort worker in Huatulco, Mexico, and Azeez, her father’s wandering South Asian ghost who tries to connect with his daughter, Farzana Doctor’s third novel, All Inclusive, is a rare, somewhat whimsical but vibrantly coloured...
by Jules Bentley R.W. Gray’s second book of short stories, Entropic, is the work of a writer exploring his gifts. Gray excels at articulating a state of pained, disempowered longing. It’s not lust, precisely, although it sometimes finds a subrogate in lust. It’s an...
by Adèle Barclay Mette Bach’s young adult fiction debut, Femme, is a decidedly modern and timely coming-of-age narrative published as part of Lorimer’s SideStreet Series. The series boasts a mandate of publishing edgy and realistic novels for young adult readers. In this vein, Bach offers a...
by Mette Bach At the outset of this review, I must admit that I am biased. The truth is I owe a lot to Amber Dawn. She has encouraged and inspired me over the years in such ways that I’ve sometimes wondered what my creative career would be like without her. When I read her work, I inevitably find...
by Matt R. Loney Like a conscientious hiker, Deborah Ellis treads skilfully through the historical terrain of her thirtieth work, Moon at Nine. The revolutionary tumult of 1980s post-shah Iran might not seem like fertile territory for a YA novel with queer and feminist themes, yet Ellis’s superbly...
by Trevor Corkum There are books that come along once in a blue moon that split you open. Not simply because of the subject matter, although Michael V. Smith’s My Body Is Yours covers ground I am familiar with—struggles with masculinity; growing up queer in a small, secretive town; feeling...
By Michael Lyons The Blue Hour is a hard film to sort into a genre. There’s a level of romance, but it’s certainly not a romantic movie. Maybe a very slow thriller, or a mostly pleasant horror? Actually, the closest thing to a genre that this feature from Thailand falls into is a Murakami...
BY MICHAEL LYONS Think about a movie that is non-stop action: explosions, guns blazing, with a trademark wisecracking, beefcake, invariably white hetero leading man—I guess what I’m saying is, think of Age of Ultron. Then think of a film that is the exact opposite of that, one that is so...
BY MICHAEL LYONS This documentary should be shown in every school as a prerequisite for becoming an adult. This statement may be showing my hand early in a review, but it’s not hyperbole. From the moment the film starts, depicting recent protests against regressive policies that limit women’s...
By Michael Lyons On their Kickstarter campaign page the producers of Naz & Maalik claim that the feature is not a political film, but it would be difficult for any piece addressing its subject matter to stay away from politics. Two gay Muslim teens, small-time, good-natured grifters, are...
by Michael Lyons Have you accepted roller derby into your life? The transformative powers of this sport are best known within queer circles, but if you want an excuse to love a tough woman with a heart of gold, on wheels, then In the Turn is the documentary for you. Unlike most documentaries that...
by Michael Lyons Two young guys hook up and decide to go on a road trip together, eventually bringing a third into their strange little relationship. In a film like this, you go in with the expectations that it’s either going to be really artistic and beautiful, with a lot of gorgeous, sweeping...
by Michael Lyons My father has a saying about our hometown: “It’s a nice place to be from.” In But I’m a Cheerleader and Itty Bitty Titty Committee director Jamie Babbit’s latest, Fresno, sisters Shannon (Judy Greer) and Martha (Natasha Lyonne) want nothing more than to escape their hopeless, banal...
by Michael Lyons As the saying often goes in the queer and trans community, it’s a small world. If you don’t know someone personally, you know someone who does, or you’ve probably seen them at a local event. Martine Stonehouse, the central figure of the new documentary Transfixed, is one of those...
by Jules Bentley We live in a world where resources, including those intended for the queer community, are overwhelmingly in the hands of upper-class white men. Queer and trans people of colour are forced to contend not only with the regime of heteronormativity that all queerness exists in contrast...
By Sugar le Fae Lake of Two Mountains, Arleen Paré’s new poetry collection, is a rich meditation on place, memory, nostalgia, and loss. Paré interweaves vignettes of family history with kaleidoscopic bursts of lake imagery, biographies of local monks, maps, plants and animals, place names, and...
BY METTE BACH When are we going to start believing women who are brave enough to come forward to share their stories? When are we going to trust that survivors know their own bodies and experiences? These questions haunted me while I read Leah Horlick’s latest collection of poems, For Your Own Good...
By Shannon Webb-Campbell Poetry is inherently queer. At the core of a poet’s craft is an ability to toy with language in a way a prose or fiction writer can’t. There are no rules in poetry, only desires. A poet can write three lines and call it a poem, whereas a novelist must adhere to an arc of a...
BY TREVOR CORKUM “We all had our own reasons for what we were about to do,” says the eleventh-grade narrator in Shawn Syms’s story “Get Brenda Foxworthy,” one of the standout stories in his stellar debut collection, Nothing Looks Familiar. In a collection that skillfully mines the inner lives of...
BY RACHNA CONTRACTOR Last year Arsenal Pulp Press published Vivek Shraya’s first novel, She of the Mountains, which elegantly juxtaposes two love stories, one based in Hindu mythology and one loosely based on Shraya’s life. With only two main characters and a handful of secondary...
BY LISA TIMPF Since I enjoyed many of Brown’s earlier works, including Sudden Death, I decided to check out one of her more recent offerings, a mystery entitled Let Sleeping Dogs Lie. Released in November 2014, this book is the ninth in a series that revolves around silver-haired...
by Derek Bedry In Cyrille Martinez’s “surreal parable” The Sleepworker, a strange fictionalized telling of Andy Warhol and John Giorgio’s creation of the film Sleep, the narrator seems to float detached above the action, an alien observer. This foreigner watches the neighbourhoods of “New York New...
by Evelyn Deshane In October 2014, transgender novelist Elliott DeLine released his third work, Show Trans: A Nonfiction Novel. DeLine’s book is both confessional booth and road novel, both romance and tragedy, and both true and entirely made up. Interspersed with screenshots of his phone...
Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon, Gender Failure (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014.) Paperback, 256 pp., $17.95 Reviewed by Rachna Contractor Based on their live multimedia show which toured across Canada, the US and UK, Gender Failure is a collection of work about rejecting the gender binary and retiring...
Casey Plett, A Safe Girl to Love (Topside Press, 2014.) Paperback, 216 pp., $16.95. Reviewed by Amber Dawn Let’s hear it for being at the right place at the right time. In early June, I found myself at the right place, which was Blue Stockings Books—Manhattan’s Lower Eastside stronghold indie...
