This is a wonderful cookbook & history unlike any I've encountered. I don't eat meat, so not all the recipes were helpful, but the way Shange writes about food & culture is entirely too delicious to pass up: "there's in us, whether we get the Holy Ghost or not, an infinite capacity to render the separation of soul & flesh impotent: to claim the wholeness of our being in the same way we go about cookin' up a storm, preparing something divine"(p 95). yes.

I don't read to much poetry - just the occasional book recommended to me by someone whose taste I appreciate. Maggie Nelson has been one of my favorite of these discoveries. In her most recent book Bluets, Nelson explains that she spent years telling people she was working on a book about the color blue without actually doing it: "mostly what happens in such cases is that people give you stories or leads or gifts, and then you can play with these things instead of words." The resulting volume is a gorgeous little meditation on the color blue & her relationship to it, on longing & loneliness & love, on language & Goethe & vision. Because she covers so much conceptual ground while remaining so beautifully accessible, I've been fighting the urge to buy copies for everyone I know.

What a delightful collection of essays about identity & the way it shifts. Bergman spent a substantial portion of hir life identifying as butch & only recently realigned hirself as trans. If you're looking for a "born in the wrong body" narrative of "becoming a man", you won't find it here. What you will find are tender, often hilarious, compassionate & provocative essays about the permeability of borders & mutability of gender. I especially loved hir critique of "passing"(p. 105)