Author: Emily Paluba

  • What Alok Teaches Us About Bodies and Love

    Alok, the transfeminine writer and performance artist, writes poetry that expands and materializes the abstract nature of the foundational queer and feminist theorist Judith Butler’s theory on gender as a collection of performances, enacting ideas like those found in feminist disability studies, with thinkers like Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. Performance theory is commonly understood as an explanation…

  • Trans Body, Earth, & Universe: Candrilli’s WATER I WON’T TOUCH

    Amidst a poetry collection full of imagery relating to the earth and the body, the title poems in Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s book Water I Won’t Touch strike an interesting chord. We enter the book wondering what water they will touch, and why there are two categories. These questions are left open, but what grounds the…

  • How to Re-Energize Back into a Routine

    Part of me doesn’t feel qualified to write this because I’ve lost touch with healthy routines so many times in the last few years. But actually, I feel like this makes me someone who can bring a lot of insight to the table when it comes to what is needed to truly create a sustainable…

  • Boundaries in DRACULA: Vampirized and Queered

    In Victorian popular fiction, the Gothic tropes of degenerate and evil monsters represent three levels of fear in society: the existence of the fears themselves, the fact that these fears are repressed, and the fear of what could happen if everything lurking under the surface is unleashed. How do people cope with dangers such as…

  • Birds in OF GODS & STRANGERS and CORRIDOR: Duality and Cycles

    Birds of unknown origin; black and white birds amid lightning strikes; birds as artificial as jewelry but as close as lovers—these are just some of the birds that make an appearance in the poetry of Tina Chang and Saskia Hamilton. But what could they mean? Chang and Hamilton are both women poets who rely heavily…