​The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw is a collection of stories where Black women and daughters contend with religion, specifically the institution of the church, on sex, relationships, and desire. The stories are all interconnected, some loosely, some following a character at different parts of their lives. Though, all of them are interested in how desire can be shamed and used as a weapon in the context of God and worship. In particular, the stand-out story is ‘Peach Cobbler’ in which a daughter watches her mother bake a peach cobbler for their pastor who has a wife and son of his own. The story follows the daughter in her first believing the pastor is God, and then becoming envious of her mother’s cooking, all while she is learning about her own desires as a woman. When the pastor asks the daughter to tutor his son, she goes over but doesn’t want his money. Though, the son is a copy of his dad in that he is cheating on her. The story discusses womanhood/virginity/desire without fully mentioning it, but instead used the cobbler as a surrogate. In which the mother prepares the peach cobbler and the pastor hungrily eats it. In how Olivia, as she grows older, intends to bake her own cobbler. The story also hints at the pastor actually being Olivia’s father, which implies that she started developing feelings for her half-brother. Then, we return to this character in ‘Instructions for Married Christian Husbands’ where the speaker lays out how she wants to have sex. It parallels ‘Peach Cobbler’ so well because now that the character has come into her own, she has embodied what her mother was doing (i.e. letting a married man have sex with her). Other notable stories in the collection were ‘How to Make Love to a Physicist’, and ‘When Eddie Levert Comes’. A succinct, though powerful read.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken is a collection of poems in which the speaker documents his stroke, his time in the hospital, and his reflections on family and life. The language is sharp and cutting, and because they’re all prose poems, it is the language that holds each one up. There were so many poems I was affected by that I would just be listing off the table of contents if I were to say which ones I liked. However, there was one poem that I reread because of how piercing it is. This poem is, ‘Redshift’, in which the speaker describes a house being on fire for six years, and a man beating his wife, “…all night, the same night…” It highlights how trauma can be unseen, its recurrence, and that no matter where you stand, there will always be pain somewhere. In one of my favorite lines of the collection, the speaker observes, “When you build on a graveyard everything is a graveyard, and / everything is a graveyard because nothing is free from history.” What exists consumes and what consumes cannot be avoided. The collection is deeply haunting in how the speaker is frank about his family, his past lovers, and the stroke that invariably changed his world. An essential read.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran is a collection of poems in which the speaker contends, contextualizes, and survives a sexual assault. Its poems draw from Vietnamese folklore, the Buddha, and the speaker’s lineage from Vietnam. There is an intensity that comes through in the poems, ‘Incident Report’, ‘Chrome’, ‘The First Law of Motion’, ‘Lipstick Elegy’, and ‘The Santa Ana’. Its lines were haunting though powerful in describing the assault and the aftereffects, specifically when marking things down in the incident report.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf is a letter addressing the indecency of war, how society views women, and how women must fight in their own way to combat war. It details the ways in which women in Britian at the time (and largely the century before) were dependent on men, not necessarily because they needed the resources their fathers/brothers/husbands provided, but because men forced that servitude and reliance on them. Woolf outlines how education, specifically education of women, is one important pillar of preventing war. While another point she makes it noting how society must restructure itself around women independence. The message is clear in her letter: war is evil. And the man she is addressing in the letter must do what he can do as a man to prevent war, while women must separately do what they can. The letter notes the beginning of Hitler, but the devastation has not quite become apparent, seeing as Woolf passed away in 1941. It is haunting and telling, while also deeply unfortunate how even before the worst of World War II, Woolf was sounding the alarm bells.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Crush by Richard Siken is a poetry collection about a man and the loss of his lover to AIDs, how it felt to be queer in the 90s, and the violence tied to those moments. The language is piercing, volatile, and propulsive in a way that physically plays out through the line breaks and white spaces. The language too, with the recurrence of blood and death, creates a sense of foreboding that blankets the whole collection. I was particularly drawn to poems such as, ‘Scheherazade’, ‘Visible World’, ‘A Primer for the Small Weird Loves’, and ‘Straw House, Straw Dog’. This violence that is tied to homophobia is so intensely described in ‘A Primer for the Small Weird Loves’ in which a boy confesses his love to another boy and is then nearly drowned, kickstarting a life of hookups and lovers where both people force violence onto each other. The speaker says, “You try to warn him, you tell him/you will want to get inside him, and ruin him,” and, “You take the things you love/and tear them apart/or you pin them down with your body and pretend they’re yours.” There’s a softness too that the speaker allows the reader to see for just a brief moment. At the end of the poem ‘You are Jeff”, the speaker’s lover reaches over and touches his hand while driving and the speaker says, “and you feel your/heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you/don’t even have a name for.” This in part relating back to the poem obsessing over names provides a grandiosity to the whole collection. I can see why this collection has withstood the test of time.
 
Final Rating: 5/5