Category: reviews
A record of interactions with material experiences.
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Monk Reviews James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips
To grow up as a “girl” is to be nearly fatally spoiled, deformed, confused, and terrified; to be responded to with falsities, to be reacted to as nothing or as a thing—and nearly to become that thing. Alice Sheldon I got into this biography after reading Tiptree’s Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. Anymore I recommend…
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Monk Reviews Testojunkie by Paul Preciado
Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era A group of us were sitting upstairs at Tattooed Mom’s after a reading I opened at the Wooden Shoe, when one of the attendees and friend of the headliner recommended me this book, suggesting I would find a lot to like about it. Me, a trans nonbinary…
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Monk Reviews We Both Laughed in Pleasure
The selected diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1999 Suddenly I saw a handful of queers were reading this. I wasn’t sure I cared, and then somehow it came up in conversation with my friend who immediately lent it to me (entrusted, really) to read. It’s a book made of diary excerpts, from the time someone is…
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Monk Reviews the Broken Earth Triology by N.K. Jemisin
This review was originally posted direct to my Instagram on November 3rd 2019. I’d been meaning to read N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy for a minute. People around me everywhere were saying how good this book was. Plus all three books of the triology won Hugo awards, which is a big big deal sci-fi fantasy…
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Monk Reviews They Is Us by Tama Janowitz
This review was originally posted direct to my Instagram on December 23rd 2019. I picked this up from a library bookshelf while I was checking out the 2nd book in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. The first few pages I opened to described a harried mom telling her pre-teen child to go to a strip…
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Monk Reviews Spliced by Jon McGoran
This review was originally posted direct to my Instagram on December 23rd 2019, so I will keep all the markup from that original here. I met the author of SPLICED while doing the live speculative fiction panel for @weirdkidswanted (ep11). He mentioned this YA book of his over the course of the panel talk, saying…
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Monk Reviews Woman Who Glows in the Dark by Elena Avila
This review was originally posted direct to my Instagram on December 23rd 2019. Here is a book I’d been wanting to read for a long time. Once again, I called it over to my local library via the online hold function. This book is about curanderismo, a syncretic healer tradition born from the mixings of…
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Monk Reviews The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell
Reading this inviting little faggot time capsule made me yet again contemplate and appreciate the power of unabashed fantasy – a word I choose over the utopia/dystopia binary. It’s a slender volume comprised of connecting vignettes, each only a page or three long. The perspective is outside/adjacent to violent/oblivious straight society. All sorts of fags…
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Monk Reviews Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Pieipzna Samarasinha
This review was originally posted direct to my Instagram on April 19, 2019, so I will keep all the markup from that original here. I wish everyone I knew read this book, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by @leahlakshmiwrites. It is so thorough and straightforward and good. It is stories. It is facts. It is…
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Monk Reviews Miscegenation Blues
Edited by Carol Camper. This review was originally posted direct to my Instagram on April 19, 2019, so I will keep all the markup from that original here. During the Philadelphia stop of her book tour, @leahlakshmiwrites, the author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice mentioned how reading this book did a lot for them,…
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Monk Reviews Cruel Fiction by Wendy Trevino
Shout out to Faye for pulling this off the shelf in Penn Book Center (now People’s Books & Culture) and telling me to at the very least read the last poem in the book. After flipping through and seeing critiques of Gloria Anzaldúa, POC identity, anti-Blackness, a poem for Jamie Berrout, and some other things…
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Monk Reviews Native Country of the Heart by Cherríe Moraga
Native Country of the Heart is Cherríe Moraga’s memoir about and relationship with her mother, Elvira. A friend and I went to go see Moraga speak at the book’s release at the People’s Forum in New York City, and we were both tearing up with deep feels in relation to the passages she read to…
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