Dear Maggie Nelson,

I am grateful for what I imagine to be your endurance through the process of obtaining a Ph.D. so that you could command the audience to prove that a book does not have to be spoon-fed narrative pablum to be richly satisfying and saturated with the truths of the human condition, to inspire innovation and reinforce lesser-expressed ways of being that transcend the status quo and imagine a more liberated future.

Orange’s assembly of Native characters in present day Oakland looking for themselves and one another in an undeniably absurd world paints the picture of our unreckoned truth. 

While the question is not directly asked in the text, multiple disappointments and betrayals are on display, and I pictured Orlando entertaining a question many trans people have asked themselves: “If this implicit gender performance I’ve been providing does not serve my happiness, why not just be myself?”

If ever you’re feeling lonely, there is Ghassan Zeineddine’s Dearborn. This collection of short stories is woven together into an inter-generational visit with beloveds. The author took me to Dearborn, Michigan to catch up with people who I’ve never met, but yet, know so well. I recommend the trip.

In her book Coming Out As Dalit, A Memoir of Surviving India’s Caste System, Yashica Dutt portrays the truth of what is at stake to those who occupy certain identities:  elements of a person’s humanity that can be painted over with false statements of value by systems of oppression.

In What It Takes To Heal, Prentis Hemphill joins the renaissance chorus of voices who are singing us out of the dark ages of pathologizing the impacts of trauma, that age-old and expiring practice of making an individual wrong/bad for having perfectly reasonable responses to the oppressive systems they are tangled with.

Young, confused queers, sympathetic incels, BDSM polyamorists, asexual lesbian-porn directors, empowered exiled teenagers, psychiatrists riddled by their own humanity, non-verbal autistic children and their maxxed-out parents, as well as one dying grandmother take the mic in Frumkin’s work.