July Westhale

It is common to hear queer origin stories: without representation, we wither and die. Mythos, birth, coming into being—these are all invaluable totems of being truly alive for those forced into the margins. Coming out stories are radical and necessary, especially in the current political landscape, for they make space for others to find their own voices, their own stories. They clear a little patch in the grass and say, Come sit a spell. However, what’s less common is an origin story rooted in what someone did in order to not come out. And that is the story of Dara, a self-identified non-practicing […]

“There are horror movies about women behaving this way. There are romantic comedies about men doing the same.”—100 Times: A Memoir of Sexism The new book by Chavisa Woods, which was released on June 25th of this year, sat unread on my nightstand for a good week before I managed the courage to pick it up. The title alone terrified me: 100 Times: A Memoir of Sexism. As a person who is sexually harassed regularly and has been sexually harassed for the majority of my adult life, it seemed like reading a book that dives into the compounding trauma of frequent sexual harassment […]

“to be or fare well/now and in the hour of our death” — from “Ave I Via,” Pet Sounds How does a poet tackle the purposefully-gigantic topic of identity in an age like ours? As Eileen Myles says of Pet Sounds: “Stephanie’s seriously interested in a total ride through relationship and humanity, song, family and what else.” Or, as Anna Moschovakis says, this book (or love) “lets the bullshit in and survives it.” Sentimentality isn’t the cliché we all throw at it; rather, it’s the crime of oversimplification. Love poems fall into the same taxonomy as identity poems for often this same […]

We are living in a golden age of lyric, hybrid forms. Following in the queer lineage of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk is a fascinating collections of prose poems and hybrid poetry. The Blue Clerk is a timely book. Self-identified as an “Ars Poetica in 59 Versos,” The Blue Clerk follows the narrative arc of a speaker/poet and an omniscient clerk—who may be the poet/speaker’s archivist, confidant, guide, or Maker, depending on where one finds themselves in the story. Captivating us with a similarly rich landscape of hues (including the fascination with indigos/blues found in Nelson’s book), this collection interweaves […]

 She didn’t understand it, this love for him, but it was there, and if seven o’clock passed, then eight, then nine, the only way she could calm herself was to remember the bomb shelter, the waiting, the silence, the planes overhead, the buildings crashing down around her. I am safe, she repeated to herself, over and over again. —Winter Kept Us Warm We may never stop writing about post-war fragmentation. After all, it takes generations to get out of a single family, and we as writers are many families. And perhaps it’s even worth venturing to say that that is […]

We’ve gone through the worst war the world has ever known. One of the ways to ensure this never happens again is to learn, to head off problems before they enlarge. No, you don’t want to be a diplomat. But Juts, you will become a citizen. –Rita Mae Brown Cakewalk, Brown’s newest novel, takes on the monumental task of portraying a town caught in the aftermath of war. Whether it’s the men who fought or the women affected by the loss of their boys, the town of Runnymede is characterized in this novel with a heightened sense of patriotism. Add […]

Even from the description, Elizabeth Swados book Walking the Dog sounds like a thrill; lauded as “a singular and unequaled artist,” this was the last published work that Swados wrote before she died in January of 2016. The book details the struggles of “former child prodigy and rich-girl kleptomaniac” Ester Rosenthal (aka Carleen Kepper) as she navigates a post-prison life as a high-end professional dog walker. The novel also maps the relationship between the ex-con protagonist and her hyper-religious Orthodox daughter. The descriptions don’t do the novel justice—not only is this a story of a woman brutalized by a system that […]

“Well, this is just like that. They keep doing it even though they don’t want to. They’re called homosexual addicts.”- Vanda, Juliana Historical fiction is a hard genre to hack. Couple that with the idea that lesbian literature—in a canonical sense, at least—has largely been reclaimed as queer retroactively, and Vanda has quite the job to do: create a historical novel about a time period in which we know very little about queerness—World War II. This includes the experience of, the sociopolitical landscape of, the vernacular of, etc. However, throughout this large, wieldy novel (which has been adapted to stage performances, book […]

Every cell of my body. Naked and tough, something new and beautiful, adorned. Learning these streets and how to walk down them. Learning how to find red silk in a  bargain bin, to tighten straps, to walk. To meet the eyes. To swish my ass, to insist in the pleasure of thighs brushing together, glaring, I will fucking kill you if you look at me. I would fall into bed, exhausted. –Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha A few years ago, I saw Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha read at Culture Fuck, and Oakland-based POC/Mixed reading that happens on a monthly basis. She had just […]