It’s an interesting experience, being a Black woman. Traversing this world born as two marginalized identities, not receiving support from either at the same time. When standing up for ourselves we are painted as aggressive, too passionate, perpetually angry, the villain. The experiences of being a woman differ globally but there seems to be a consensus that being a woman entails some sort of suffering at the hands of patriarchal society. At least that’s how it is explored within white women’s spaces. Albeit true, when Black women come into these spaces to impart their own experiences being a woman coupled with being Black, suddenly we are shunned. Suddenly we don’t know what it’s like to be a woman because we are Black. What they refuse to realize is that our womanly experience is unique. It’s beautiful, it's painful, it’s joyous, it breeds community. This is explored within Angelique Zobitz’s poetry book Seraphim.
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As the Bard himself once said, “The course of true love never did run smooth,” (AMND, 1.1.136) and that certainly is the case in C.J. Spataro’s debut novel, More Strange Than True, a story of fairy mischief in truly Shakespearean proportions. Instead of existing merely as a retelling of a beloved classic, the novel luxuriates in themes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, expanding on and complicating them and sometimes rejecting them entirely.
The word love—and related affixes, including lover and beloved—appears 159 times in Maggie Nelson’s Like Love. That figure shouldn’t come as a surprise given the essay collection’s title. Nelson, a prominent and prolific writer who has previously examined the intangible and ever present idea of love in her autotheoretical book The Argonauts (2015), forms the title from a quote by writer Hilton Alys: “Every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love.” Nelson satiates that need in Like Love, giving her readers chunks of critical theory to chew on and delectable bites of raw honesty and vulnerability to savor.
“Change is the only constant,” Chelsea Stickle writes in “Worship What Keeps You Alive”, the first flash fiction piece of her chapbook. This quote perfectly encapsulates Everything’s Changing, where nothing’s as it seems. The world has changed and the possibilities are endless in Stickle’s book, but one thing is as prevalent in this book as it is in society, and that’s the struggles of women and girls. Stickle uses absurdities throughout the book to tell stories, depicting women attempting to navigate a world that doesn’t like nor respect them. The problems women face are often overlooked, but Stickle reimagines these problems and tells them in a way that’ll have readers begging for more.
Katya Zinn’s first published full-length collection of stories, essays, and poems, titled Manic Depressive Pixie Dream Girl, is an extreme exercise in examining the damage done to women by capitalism, social constructs, neurodivergence, and the patriarchy—to name a few.
Zinn is hardly the first woman to notice that gender—and the stereotypes it forces people to contend with—can have a tragic impact on females. Women, after all, are statistically far more likely to be sexually assaulted, have undiagnosed mental illnesses, and be victims of intimate partner violence. Zinn’s collection, which is broken into multiple parts, touches on all of these circumstances. |
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