first post: Ally's 2023 book recommendations
low-hanging fruit
Just what the world needs: another Substack.
I haven’t quite decided what I will write about here and I don’t have much faith in my ability to post consistently. However, given the agonizingly slow demise of Twitter and the fact that I have no desire to be a TikTok girlie or an Instagram influencer, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try out a new platform where I can impose my silly little text-based thoughts upon an unsuspecting audience without having to be 1) hot or 2) a video editor.
Like most unpopular, pretentious little nerds, loving books has been a core personality trait of mine since I was a child, and for a long time I believed that this made me special or better than the plebeian masses who have no taste or appreciation for literature. It doesn’t. But although I have (hopefully) shed most of my middle-school era pretentiousness by now, I still read constantly, and giving unsolicited book recommendations is one of my favorite love languages.
Also, I want to practice having something more insightful to say about the many books I read and love than “That was great!” This is my attempt at developing a more thoughtful critical voice by singing the praises of some of my favorite books of the past year.
So, for my first-ever Substack post, please enjoy these book recommendations.
Recommendations for poets & poetry lovers (is there such thing as a poetry lover who is not a poet?):
ballast by Quenton Baker (Haymarket Books 2023) - Seattle-based poet Baker’s much-anticipated second book ballast is a revelation. The collection is split into two sections: the first is erasures of US Senate documents concerning the 1841 revolt upon the slave ship Creole, wherein 135 people escaped chattel slavery in the only successful, large-scale revolt of American-born enslaved people. These erasures (probably the most effective use of this form I’ve ever read) wrest agency back from the obliterating mouth of white supremacist history and give voice to the people who escaped the Creole, of whom no surviving record or testimony exists. In the essay “Washing the Bones” at the end of ballast, Baker writes, “[W]hen I read this Senate document, I wanted to harm it. I wanted to visit a certain kind of violence upon it. And so I did.” The result is a breathtaking testament to Black survival and “life on the knife’s edge.”
The second section is an imaginative series of poems (which can also be read as one long poem) exploring the afterlife of slavery. Each page in this section can be read omnidirectionally, which is an impressive feat of craft that underscores the atemporality of history for Black people and challenges the reader’s ideas of linearity. I cannot sing this book’s praises highly enough, and if you are lucky enough to hear Baker read from this book either in person or virtually, I implore you to do so. It’s a transcendent experience.
Bianca by Eugenia Leigh (Four Way Books 2023) - In Leigh’s stunning second book, which I read in one breathless sitting, we meet a speaker whose marriage and motherhood are colored by the ghosts of abuse, generational trauma, and mental illness that haunt her family history. “I thought I forgave you,” writes Leigh, addressing the specter of the speaker’s father, “Then I took root and became / someone’s mother.” Through lyrically resonant and emotionally devastating poems, we see the speaker fight to break free from the cycle of abuse and commit to choosing herself and life every day. Bianca is both a celebration of resilience and a deeply honest exploration of how strange it is to be living a life you never imagined you’d survive long enough to see.
Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe (Milkweed Editions 2022) - This is THE book. I evangelize this book to everyone I meet like I’m one of those door-to-door Jesus salespeople. It’s that good. Codjoe’s long-anticipated debut explores the interiority of Black womanhood, the complexities and precarity of embodiment, and the many constructions of the self. These poems, which are in conversation with a rich lineage of Black visual art, literature, and archival work, are strikingly intimate and capital-S Sensual. Using language and imagery that is both tender and sometimes brutal in its precision, Codjoe asks what it means to look and be looked at and attempts to measure the distance between an object and its representation. In the titular poem, Codjoe writes, “I want to be seen clearly or not at all.” This collection is a reclamation of subjectivity, a demand to be seen.
Sexy & subversive queer fiction that will make you cry:
I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by M Crane (Catapult Books 2023) - Crane’s debut novel, which Catapult describes as “Dept. of Speculation meets Black Mirror,” takes place in an America in which prisons no longer exist—instead, people who are accused of crimes are given an extra shadow and referred to as “Shadesters,” an underclass of people who are deprived of their rights, intensely surveilled, and publicly ostracized. The novel follows Kris, a Shadester, as she struggles in the aftermath of her wife’s death while giving birth to their child, who is subsequently born with an extra shadow of her own. Written with a poetic attention to language and ferocious tenderness and humor, this book is a heartbreaking and heartmaking exploration of parenting through grief and how chosen family and queer resistance allow us to survive. Plus, this book includes some of the best sex scenes I’ve read in recent memory.
MANHUNT by Gretchen Felker-Martin (Tor Nightfire 2022) - After an apocalyptic virus ravages the planet and turns anyone with enough testosterone in their body into a feral, cannibalistic monster, the book follows a group of trans people who hunt down feral men and harvest and synthesize their testicles for estrogen in order to keep the plague at bay. Whew. MANHUNT’s got it all: body horror, the eerily relevant proliferation of fascism via TERF ideology, the death of JK Rowling, and smoking hot t4t sex. This is a book that will challenge you and make you uncomfortable intellectually, emotionally, and viscerally. It’s a gruesome, brutal read that’s not for the faint of heart or stomach (I’ll give a blanket content warning for pretty much anything you can think of), but by the end I fell in love with these characters and the way that their care for each other made even the most hellish apocalypse imaginable worth surviving.
The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia (Nightboat Books 2023) -As someone who normally breezes through books, this one forced me to slow down and savor every lush, rich, lyrical sentence, often reading and re-reading paragraphs multiple times to ensure that I’d absorbed each silken layer of meaning. My instinct is to say that this book is unlike anything I’ve ever read, but I think that’s an oversimplification—Mattia’s sweeping roman à clef is difficult to categorize, but it is also in loving conversation with so many other writers, artists, and muses across time and place including Sappho, Édouard Glissant, Eleanor Rykener, and Townes Van Zandt. This is a book that resists aboutness so I won’t attempt to summarize it—rather, I will say that Mattia’s prose shimmers like a splash of cum upon a lover’s cheek. Mattia weaves a story that is both fantastical and devastatingly real, and the best way to experience it is to treat it like falling in love—surrender yourself wholly to the passion and sensuality of each glistening page.
I have more recommendations and reviews to share, but this post is already longer than I care to write and you care to read. Have you read any of these books? Do you have book recommendations for me? Let me know!
P.S. Speaking of books, mine is available for pre-order (even though it won’t actually hit shelves until 2025). Please forgive me for the ongoing shameless plugs over the next 3ish years.