At the heart of Christine Kalafus’ upcoming memoir Flood (2025) is a powerful image: a rush of water, not a deluge from the skies but a slow rising from below, invisibly soaking through the porous foundations of an old house until, before you know it, you are wading ankle deep in what was the solid…
Category: Book Reviews
Infrastructural Freedom Dreaming: On Jina B. Kim’s “Care at The End of The World”
Image Credit: © Jina B. Kim, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press, 2025), reproduced under fair use provision (review). Jina B. Kim begins her new book – as the title, Care at The End of The World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing (2025),…
“If Nothing” by Matthew Nienow – An Alphabetical Review
An Alphabetical Review of “If Nothing” by poet Matthew Nienow (Alice James Books, 2025)
Capturing COVID-Era Isolation and Illness in Poems: A Book Review of “Days of Grace and Silence”
In her memoir Days of Grace and Silence (2024), Ann E. Wallace gives shape and resonance to her experience as an illness exile navigating long-haul COVID, from March 2020 through the spring of 2023. Wallace was the Poet Laureate of Jersey City, New Jersey, from 2023 to 2024, and has written about illness, disability, and…
“Innocent” and “Guilty” AIDS Victims: A Review of The Life and Times of Ryan White by Paul M. Renfro
Flyer, “Bring Your Grief and Rage About AIDS to a Political Funeral in Washington, D.C.” October 11, 1992. Several years ago, I was asked to give a presentation for World AIDS Day while working as a sexual health educator at a youth center. Popular histories of AIDS activism were in vogue, such as David…
Garth Greenwell is my Emergency Contact: Meditations on Small Rain
Fittingly, I begin this in a hospital. I am in the vascular medicine department of the Cleveland Clinic, awaiting a routine follow-up ultrasound for the “minimally invasive” procedure I had last week, when I begin organizing my notes for an essay on Garth Greenwell’s new novel, Small Rain (2024). I say minimally invasive, because this…
Book Review: Inspired and Outraged by Alice Rothchild
“[T]he analyst who points us out from our classmates and announced (disapprovingly)/ You women are taking the place of a productive male…You are here because of your Unresolved Penis Envy” (pp 166-7). These are the attitudes which Dr. Alice Rothchild, obstetrician and gynecologist at Beth Israel Hospital, Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology…
Book Review: Blood Loss by Keiko Lane
Blood is an enduring metaphor for heteronormative kinship. However, Keiko Lane, author of the new memoir Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art (Duke, 2024), appropriates the image of blood as a symbol for the queer intimacies forged in coalitional AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s. The memoir follows Lane as…
Book review: Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of the Cesarean Section
The prologue to Invisible Labor tells the story of author Rachel Somerstein’s cesarean section. After her labor stalled, Somerstein was asked to consent to a surgical birth after more than a whole day in labor. She agreed and the procedure began. From there, the situation deteriorated. Somerstein had a faulty epidural and she could feel…
Towards an Asian American Disability Politics: On Mimi Khúc’s “Dear Elia”
Sami Schalk, in Black Disability Politics (2022), notes “the limited scholarly work on the specific approaches to disability politics within particular racialized communities thus far” (162). Schalk explains that the lack of such scholarly work prevents her from exploring to what extent a Black disability politics overlaps with the disability politics of Indigenous and Native,…