Category Archives: Books + Literature

The Weird Sister Collection, Now Available for Preorder from The Feminist Press

Cover for The Weird Sister Collection by Mary Anne Carter, featuring colorful gem illustrations


We’re excited to share that The Weird Sister Collection, an anthology of writing from the Weird Sister blog along with some new work, will be published next month by The Feminist Press and is now available for preorder!

Collecting the best of the underground blog Weird Sister, these unapologetic and insightful essays link contemporary feminism to literature and pop culture.

Launched in 2014, Weird Sister proudly staked out a corner of the internet where feminist writers could engage with the literary and popular culture that excited or enraged them. The blog made space amid book websites dominated by white male editors and contributors, and also committed to covering literary topics in-depth when larger feminist outlets rarely could. Throughout its decade-long run, Weird Sister served as an early platform for some of contemporary literature’s most striking voices, naming itself a website that “speaks its mind and snaps its gum and doesn’t apologize.”

Edited by founder Marisa Crawford, The Weird Sister Collection brings together the work of longtime contributors such as Morgan Parker, Christopher Soto, Soleil Ho, Julián Delgado Lopera, Virgie Tovar, Jennif(f)er Tamayo, and more, alongside new original essays. Offering nuanced insight into contemporary and historical literature, in conversation with real-life and timely social issues, these pieces mark a transitional and transformative moment in online and feminist writing.

Advance praise for The Weird Sister Collection:

The Weird Sister Collection is a reminder that feminism doesn’t live solely in academia and activism, and in fact makes its most defiant moves at the margins of orthodoxy. The book’s mix of poetics, criticism, and pop culture is an unruly and potent brew that fizzes with life as it vaporizes feminist and literary conventions.”—Andi Zeisler, co-founder of Bitch; author of We Were Feminists Once: From RiotGrrrl to CoverGirl™, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement

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Isolated and Deeply Enmeshed: A Conversation with Sarah Heady

In 2013 poet Sarah Heady went out to southeastern Nebraska for a writing residency at Art Farm, a program started by a woodworker who’d grown up in that farmhouse. While introducing her to the place, he invited Heady to poke around the attic, which was filled with turn-of-the-20th century magazines and newspapers. It was July on the prairie, and it was sweltering. “So I went up there and spent a long afternoon sweating and looking through these old magazines from the teens and twenties,” Heady says.

Mostly, she told me, she was drawn to the stacks of a magazine called Comfort, “which was like a Ladies’ Home Journal for rural women.”

Touted as “the key to happiness and success in over a million and a quarter homes,”[1] Comfort was a mail-order magazine published from 1888 to 1942 by Gannet & Morris out of Augusta, Maine. Primarily a means to advertise Gannet’s Giant Oxien, a snake oil cure-all, Comfort increased its circulation ten-fold in the first six years of publication, making it the first magazine in America to surpass one million subscribers.

The pages of the magazine were filled with articles and ads about domestic life, in some ways much like those that fill magazines marketed to women today: advice columns, beauty tips, and recipes, with a tinge of early-internet-esque information sharing. “People would write in with questions about what was wrong with their chickens or share recipes for food or fertilizer for the kitchen garden,” Heady says. More surprising for today’s readers might be the ads for things like pessaries, mechanical devices used to keep one’s uterus in place to recover after a prolapse, most common after a woman has had multiple vaginal births.

Heady left Art Farm with photographs of many pages of Comfort magazine and other similar periodicals. When she got home, she started experimenting with constructing poems from this found language and, eventually, many other primary and secondary sources about the settlement of the Great Plains. These experiments, interspersed with other lyric pieces, eventually became her second book, Comfort.

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Anti-Capitalist Love Poems for the Future: Marie Buck’s Unsolved Mysteries

Marie Buck Unsolved Mysteries review Weird Sister
What makes a life worth documenting? And whose lives are most often documented in capitalist societies?
Unsolved Mysteries, Marie Buck’s most
recent book of poetry, raises these questions and more as the author explores the television show of the same title. Completed before the Netflix 2020 reboot of the series, Buck’s book focuses on the show’s original run in the 1980s and 90s. However, this book isn’t about rehashing or dwelling in the past, nor is it simply about a TV show and the terrible deaths the show documented. Ultimately, it is a book about life and the reasons to keep going. It’s about imagining a future where things aren’t so shitty.  

The poems throughout Unsolved Mysteries feature a speaker who is likely the author themself: a leftist organizer whose day job is with a publication (Buck is the managing and web literary editor at Social Text). Many of the long, discursive poems tend toward prose and could just as easily be described as lyric essays. They explore media the speaker has consumed, from books to documentaries; detail explicit sexual encounters; discuss protest and activism; and document working class people’s lives. 

A number of poems take for their titles the names of people featured in Unsolved Mysteries episodes, such as “Dottie Caylor,” a poem in which the author details a missing woman who was most likely killed by her husband, and “Kari Lynn Nixon,” an incredible poem about possible liberation from small town norms:

I imagine some scenarios 

in which

she leaves because she’s being abused

or to go be queer in New York City

 

or to go do drugs in New York City

or to go be with a lover in New York City

 

Buck imagines Kari Lynn Nixon and a friend living in a squat, finding loving chosen families, falling in love with people, and making weird art (perhaps an escape dream of Buck’s own, who elsewhere in the book details growing up in rural South Carolina). Devastatingly, after dreaming of the possibilities of a different life, Buck reveals the episode has an update that Kari was raped and murdered by a neighbor. This gets right to one of the major themes of the book, as Buck writes in “Documentation”: “Most of the people in Unsolved Mysteries would not have very well-documented lives, were it not for their horrible deaths.” The author connects this to a book by Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966), which describes how to use visuals for extreme memorization, a common practice “for record-keeping before people had easy access to paper and print” that can be used to create a memory system for ideas. Yates warns against using the “anonymous lower classes” in these visual exercises, unless the image is made exceptional by disfiguring them, “as by introducing one stained with blood.” Buck interprets this concept for us: “we can bloodstain people when we think of them, and then they are memorable.” Buck inverts the memorization trick by imagining wealthy people, like Jeff Bezos, stained with blood in order to remember the lives of people like those featured in Unsolved Mysteries Continue reading

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Those Objects of Desire: A Conversation with Rachelle Toarmino on Objectification, Persona & the Internet

Rachelle Toarmino Weird Sister

That Ex, writer and editor Rachelle Toarmino’s debut poetry collection, came out last summer with Big Lucks Books. God, does this book vibe. It vibes way down in the bones of every relationship you’ve ever had, of every love you’ve lost or are afraid to lose. Like the Libra the author is, That Ex is all cool sophistication and casual glamour on the surface while bubbling up with eager tenderness and brutal honesty underneath. Toarmino gives herself and her reader permission to revel in the love poem while never letting anyone forget that emotional apocalypse is around the corner, that there’s something exploitative in documenting your love, that there’s nothing we crave more than total devastation.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I was reading think pieces about anticipatory grief, a term that continues to be thrown around during this period of universal loss. That Ex speaks to that kind of fearful breath-holding: we know something disastrous is going to happen but must push on with living anyway. The speaker’s relationship status is constantly in flux from poem to poem. In “I Wanted to Ask You,” the speaker is in a relationship. In “I Said Okay,” the speaker admits “what doesn’t kill you / makes you mad for the rest of your life” and as a reader, one is left on unsteady ground, looking apprehensively into the future, knowing what has been lost and wondering what else there is to lose. Toarmino references the poems’ speaker as “that ex,” but the speaker could also be the you (or multiple yous) comprising the addressees of these love poems, hate poems, and I-couldn’t-care-less-about-you poems. Either way, even the title of this collection casts every use of the future and past tenses into turmoil: we know this will end, but when? Who is that ex? Will I be next?

***

Gion Davis: What makes a person “that ex”? Is there any way for a woman/femme to process her grief or anticipatory grief about a relationship without becoming “that ex,” or is it impossible to escape the patriarchal, misogynistic and contradictory expectations of being a perfect woman even after a relationship has ended?

Rachelle Toarmino: We all know that ex—the one who can’t let go. I wanted the title to nod to a gossipy recognition—we’re expected to know what someone means when they qualify a noun with that—as so much of the book is about having fun with the term’s reclamation. What’s less chill-girl than writing a whole book about your breakups?

I’m also interested in the grammar of that and how it communicates a subject making an object out of something. That is the direction of an outstretched finger—no word in the English language does more pointing than that. But then a magic happens when my speaker, after finding herself on the receiving end of that looking, turns to the reader and yells “Look!” She resists objectification by insisting on the significance of her pain—its power to be interesting, even. Continue reading

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A Boundary Broken: A Review of Running to Stand Still by Kimberly Reyes

Running to Stand Still Kimberly Reyes

Kimberly Reyes’ poetry is obsessed with the fragmentation of both the memory and the body. In her debut collection, Running to Stand Still (Omnidawn Publishing, 2019), Reyes recounts a life of unrelenting anti-Blackness, familial and generational trauma, and the inherent violences of dating in the digital age. Surprisingly, rather than focus solely on the interior narrative of a Black woman speaker, Reyes jarringly places us at the periphery amongst characters who enact violence on her. Past lovers, classmates, family members, and pop culture figures build an echo chamber for the speaker’s experience. While the “I” is constant, the speaker, passive and matter-of-fact, acts as a window providing the reader a glimpse into the incessant, ignorant, and truly degrading interactions that haunt her everyday life. Through sharing the lived experiences of a Black, Puerto Rican woman speaker, Running to Stand Still suggests there is no escaping the horror of both memory and body, how they are inherently fragmented and their boundaries broken without consent.

Throughout Running to Stand Still, Reyes presents this fragmentation of memory within personal and cultural lineages. Through the creation and use of terms such as rememory and dismemory, Reyes plays with the conception of truth as it applies to Black womanhood as the book’s speaker grapples with what she can recall and what others recall for her. In the third poem of the book, “Rememory,” she writes “My mother, the one to recall / this day, for me.” Ancestral and familial women anchor many poems in the opening sections of the book as the speaker’s mother, grandmother, and even the famous poet Gwendolyn Brooks act as gatekeepers to memory. In “Epigenetics, Elegy and Effigy” Reyes writes about finding her great great grandmother’s name in an online database, which conveniently leaves out who she was enslaved to. The closing lines: “women without a world / that won’t claim / us / or how our mothers / only knew / birthright belonging / is the maim.” To remember is to harm oneself, and so Reyes leaves the burden of memory to others, doubling down on her aversion to her own recollections. She writes in one poem, “I can’t be expected to recollect every detail,” in another “so my narration is jerky, / preemptive, unreliable,” and yet in another “liars are the most reliable people you know.”  Continue reading

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A Witch’s Reading Report

Waking the Witch Pam Grossman

In her book Waking The Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic and Power, witch-ambassador Pam Grossman compares her feelings about witches going mainstream to the time when her favorite indie band blew up: “I was happy for them, because it meant that they were being appreciated and compensated, and that mattered to me. But I was also afraid that their music would become watered down.” Grossman’s mixed feelings resonate with my own apprehensions about this moment. As a psychic practitioner from a family of spiritual nonconformists, I embody this archetype publicly: the magic woman whose knowledge is feared, desired and also scorned. A body on fire. 

As I watch the witch ascend into the mainstream—everywhere from women’s coworking space The Wing calling itself a “coven” to witch-inspired looks at Fashion Week—I’m forced to reckon with the suppressed witch legacy of my own family. While my family background is now increasingly considered “cool” or “different,” as a child I knew instinctively to distance myself from “The New Age” and ideas that would sound the alarm bells of the Reality Police. I kept my visions to myself. In school, I honed a comedic routine making fun of my psychic mom to classmates, while quietly accepting my own intuitive experiences, and letting them guide me. I never thought I’d be performing psychic readings, until suddenly I was, unable to hide anymore. But my own resistance remains strong. There are many days I torture myself: “Do I really have to stand up for this… represent this?” When I’m feeling particularly misunderstood, threatened or unsupported, I fight the urge to take it all back. As a sonic medicine, I’ve started to employ “Too Late to Turn Back Now” by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose, a jam which caught my attention in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. I spin in my room and let the music gently soothe me onwards. 

While Grossman sees the witch’s rise as evidence of a paradigmatic sea-change, I am more skeptical, though not entirely unhopeful. What I’ve noticed in my own life and in the lives of other psychic practitioners with whom I organize is that so far this witch trend has not translated into meaningful public support or acts of institutional inclusion. The “What do you do?” question remains dicey for the working witches I know. Whether you get challenged on your worldview, or asked for a free reading, it’s a lot of labor and stress. There is a palpable hunger for psychic knowledge and insight, but at the same time a deep accusation stands in the room with me when I announce this possibility out loud. How can you tell me that magic is real? Everybody knows that magic is fake, failed, dead. Gone. Continue reading

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NYC Book Launch: VAST NECROHOL

VAST NECROHOL Caolan Madden

Come to the launch party for Weird Sister contributor & editor Caolan Madden’s new chapbook VAST NECROHOL (Hyacinth Girl Press), tomorrow in Brooklyn!  Continue reading

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Two Cities, Fairy Tales, & a Marathon Sprint: An Interview with Muriel Leung

Muriel Leung, poet.

Photo by Sarah Gzemski.

Muriel Leung is an Asian American poet who defies convention and form, who adds whimsy to everyday objects and exposes the darkness behind them, and who pushes the boundaries between the real and the normal and the hyperbolic and absurd in her work. Her first collection, Bone Confetti (Noemi Press), toys with the magical yet apocalyptic and the romantic yet grotesque; it is both a strut through a flowery meadow and a devastating walk through the ruins of a ravaged city. I joined Leung in her adorable Echo Park, Los Angeles apartment for this conversation in racial politics, Asian American poetics, labor, and grief.

MV: What was the process behind writing Bone Confetti? As a fairly young poet, how did you balance writing and coming-of-age in your 20s?

ML: I wrote the bulk of Bone Confetti during my MFA, which I started in 2013. I moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana from Queens, New York, which is where I grew up. I had the great fortune of having a wealth of different experiences, to work with different people and communities beforeLouisiana. It was such a big move and shift—from going to a chaotic city that constantly displaces people and is very difficult to live in—to then move to Louisiana where the pace of life is different. Baton Rouge has a different set of racial politics, where being an Asian woman there meant something entirely different than in NY.

I also began to understand the history of resilience in Louisiana, which has seen so much social, political, and environmental turmoil. I saw how much this was embedded in the fabric of its history that if there is a storm coming, people know they have to cook all the meat in their freezer because the power might go out, so they just throw a big barbecue. The attitude of survival in Baton Rouge is very different from NYC, which sometimes doesn’t know what to do with itself other than facilitate high productivity. I think both city’s spirits contributed to Bone Confetti, which was a very important transitional point in my life—a whole wealth of experience and language. Continue reading

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“It’s like you had to split yourself in two to watch yourself”: 21 Moments in Lauren Levin’s The Braid

Lauren Levin‘s poetry collection The Braid (Krupskaya Books, 2017) is described by its publisher as “a fever dream of pregnancy and early parenting in the era of the police state.” Here are 21 moments and meditations, strung together from from this whirlwind text.

1. The Braid opens wondering, “what it means / to say we want our work to be vulnerable when we’re the ones who make it.” (13)

Vulnerability is the ultimate braveness, admitting one’s own insecurity.  Telling the truths we are not sure we can understand.  Standing in our uncertainty and being willing to speak from there. It is guts. This book has guts.

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A Tactile Encounter: A Review of Slabs by Brittany Billmeyer-Finn

Slabs Timeless Infinite Light Brittany Billmeyer-Finn

The book fits in your hand: it can go inside the back pocket of your jeans. It is truly portable, and the tactile encounter of the book, I believe, conditions the reading experience. There is that feeling of manageability, contrary to its title, Slabs, that is being invoked by poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn‘s second collection, released in 2016 from Timeless, Infinite Light.

The book is arranged in two parts. The language is fragmentary—as a reader, it seems as though I am eavesdropping. The conversation has been going on long before the reader opened the book, and now we are entering in and out of the narrative at any given point. What is beginning? What is ending? How do I situate and locate myself in relationship to the text?

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