Amanda

C.L. Clark's Unbroken is what happens when colonial revolt, powerful women with muscular arms, and Sapphic yearning crash together in a fiery fantasy epic. Set against an elegantly elaborate, North African-inspired landscape, the story turns around Touraine, a soldier suffering under split loyalties, and Luca, a princess passionately pursuing her promised throne (and occasionally her sense). 

Clark's composition is sharp-edged, swift, and gorgeously ruthless. Her characters, often caught stumbling through dubious decisions, come alive with genuine, often distressing, humanity. After all, to err is human! Clear your calendar (and maybe your voice) if you delight in shouting affectionate rebukes at fictional figures who firmly ignore you. 

Political intrigues simmer, rebellions fester, and morally murky waters always hide whatever is just beneath the surface, but the real gem? Touraine and Luca's yearning, fiercely oblivious and always simmering. Their slow-burning relationship doesn't just smolder before catching flame; it inches achingly along, making you pine with every missed sign. If you're anything like me, you'll beg aloud for signals to be picked up on, stars to align, and for hearts to meet and then stay together for at least three hundred pages. 

Prepare yourself for a story whose title resonates through the tale itself in ways you won't soon forget, at least if your fantasy inclination is toward clever plots, tangled uprisings against colonialism, and romances rife with slow burns. 

There are books that don't just enter the bloodstream—they become it. Not text but tide: a push and pull, dense with undertow. Postcolonial Love Poem is one of those. Natalie Diaz writes in a tongue heavy with sediment and blood, syllables formed by muscle and scraped from memory. The rhythms here are heartbeat, floodplain, oxygen, and drift. Water-strong and water-strange, these poems sweep readers into depths beyond the limits of language.

I read with breath caught beneath my ribs, snagged in the space between reach and retreat. What mutters in the marrow? What had I lost before I could give it a name? Not absence as an idea but absence as an anatomical fact: the hollow where a tooth was pulled, the socket still raw. Diaz's landscapes aren't metaphor—they're anatomy. Sacred cartographies stitched into tendons, breath drawn from basins and ranges, each word a stone burnished by mouths that would not forget.

Diaz writes the body the way a flash flood writes a canyon—with sudden force, patient aftermath, and sediment settling into curves. It's erosion made evident and passion worn down to a shine. Her poems render desire not as ornament but architecture. Desire constructs its own scaffolding. Touch refuses erasure. Each line spills past its margins, ignoring the usual fences. Her syntax sprawls like an arroyo after a storm—necessary, alive. Every poem carries tension at its seam: beauty snagged on brutality, taking braided with being taken, grace howling under resistance like wind through canyon walls.

Reading, I felt myself on the bank of a river I've never seen, yet somehow recognise—something stirring under the skin, salt in the throat, mud between toes. The distance here isn't only geographical. It's blood-deep—generations of forgetting can taste like copper pennies, can sound like static where stories should be. Still, recognition rang in my chest like the particular thrum a struck bell makes underwater. Diaz's water doesn't cleanse—it presses in and leaves behind sediment and salt. It's water that remembers the shape of every mouth that tried to swallow it.

What stunned me most was how Diaz treats contradiction like a live wire—only she doesn't insulate it, doesn't ground it; she just lets it spark across the page. Love is both a wound and a weapon. The colonised body contains both divinity and desecration. It's the specific friction between being witnessed and being spared, between being held and being handled. In "American Arithmetic", flesh transforms into fraction, protest, and ghost—sometimes all at once. "The First Water Is the Body" isn't a metaphor—it's an assertion, an equation, and an invocation. Every sentence costs something. Every line demands breath, blood, presence.

I reached the book's end feeling both hollowed out and heavier. Something passed close in the current—close enough to feel, too far to catch. These poems didn't offer inheritance, but they offered rhythm—footfall, heartbeat, the click of prayer beads between fingers. Perhaps I don't remember the river. But maybe the river remembers something no one taught me the shape of, and maybe that's enough. Or maybe it isn't. Diaz doesn't offer closure—only space. She lets longing settle like silt, unresolved and unashamed.

Her work isn't merely poetry. It's a pressure system. It is akin to a body of water, possessing its own unique gravitational pull. It transforms from grit to grief and then back to grace. It's a map marked by salt. I'll return to it—not for clarity but for contact. To press again against what I cannot name. To listen for that thin, familiar note—the one that travels through bedrock, through silence, through marrow.

The Archer moves with the methodical, recurring, and emotionally controlled intensity of mastered movement. In this debut novel, Shruti Swamy resists spectacle in favour of scrutiny—of the body, of memory, and of the hidden labour of becoming someone you were assured you couldn't be.

Set in mid-century Bombay, The Archer follows Vidya, a girl drawn to kathak dancing by yearnings she cannot name—not only for performance but also for isolation, self-mastery, and liberation. The limiting choreography of daughterhood shapes her life, while her aspiration alters every space she moves through. The elegant minimalism of Swamy's work—short, precise lines that never strain for impact—is remarkable. The book develops not through sudden revelation, but through the precise and calculated repetition of choices that are returned, refused, and ultimately made once again.

Although kathak is not in my cultural background, the book carefully and curiously drew me towards it. Arriving unversed as I did, aware of my distance, made me appreciate Swamy not over-explaining. She respects the tradition rather than making an exhibit of it. Here, kathak is form and philosophy rather than merely metaphor. Its rhythms resound in the pace of the book: stillness, repetition, variation, and breath. The process left me with a growing curiosity about how the dance lives in the history it embodies.

Oftentimes, the emotional and narrative framework of The Archer is an extension of that form. This book doesn't have a linear plot in the conventional sense, but there is no doubt that there's an important story here. The narrative circles back on itself, stressing internal transformations before outside events. This framework fosters immersion but also runs the risk of stasis; some sections serve as echoes of past ones without clearly expanding on them, and some emotional beats seem to land the same way more than once. Readers seeking a strong narrative force could find themselves adrift.

In particular, the restraint of the book might calcify into detachment for some readers. Swamy's approach is all about control: about what is left unsaid and what is all but unseen. This powerful aesthetic choice also sometimes leaves Vidya feeling artistically remote, with her inner existence more mapped out than embodied. We're sometimes shown what she does with beautiful precision, often with the reason why, but at times it's hard to echo her feelings in the moment. Some key scenes felt detached, as if we were watching from behind glass.

A similar flattening effect also applies to secondary characters, meaning figures like Manorama, Vidya's mentor and the most emotionally charged presence in the novel, can feel more like symbols than fully formed people. The roles they play are clear and crucial—teacher, foil, or obstacle—but their texture can get lost in the exacting form of the prose. Focussing solely on Vidya's viewpoint is practical and serves as an effective storytelling technique, yet it diminishes the emotional depth of her relationships.

Despite any criticism around its austerity and distance, The Archer thrums with composed tension, especially around the idea of desire. Though it never states it clearly, the book is deeply queer in this regard. Vidya's relationship with Manorama is filled with both reverence and longing, and her decision to forego marriage and motherhood appears to be more an active act of refusal than one of hesitation. Here, the queerness is subtextual, even spectral, but manifestly present in how attention flows between the women and how their intimacy alters their sense of self. It may not be clearly romantic or even completely aware of its existence, but it is absolutely there.

Swamy writes with the exactitude of a dancer; no unnecessary effort or strain. Though they are sparse, her sentences are effective. She depends on the stillness within them and puts her trust in the reader's efforts to listen closely. By means of those efforts it gives something rarer than the emotional catharsis it often calculatedly withholds: the sensation that the book was carefully constructed, not merely written.

The ending does not so much resolve everything as it brings about a shift in Vidya's life. The decisions she makes seem neither sad nor triumphant, just important. We are left with a sense of movement—direction without destination and a life starting on it own terms.

The Archer is not an overly generous book, nor a kind one. Still, it is exacting, and its exactness has a special sort of appeal. For readers with a predisposition toward interiority, self-discipline, and the complexity of queer self-invention, it provides something even more lasting: not a revelation, but a resonance

Maggie Millner's Couplets is a novel-in-verse that explores the fierce intensity of falling in love and how it affects one's expression, especially when the initial excitement begins to falter and fail. This debut reads like a challenge to form itself: can desire, betrayal, and queer longing be woven into the rigid dance of couplets without dulling their edge or dimming their jagged shine? Miraculously, musically, the answer is yes.

Here, an unnamed narrator—anchored by habit to a boyfriend both familiar and fading—plunges headlong into an affair with a magnetic older woman, drawn by the raw gravity of new desire. What begins as a bright rupture soon grows knotted and rough: shame, self-questioning, the anxious rewriting of the self in search of a truer script. Millner captures the exhilarating rise of infatuation with a poet's sharpened precision. She also portrays the gradual erosion of certainty with a storyteller's hunger for ache and truth.

The couplets themselves are never ornamental. They reflect the novel's deeper tensions: two lines yoked by attraction, expectation, sound, and sense. Their rhymes are at turns tender or jagged, slipping loose or locking tight. When rhyme feels effortless, it becomes dangerous and deceptive; it creates a sonic echo of alluring surfaces, revealing how ease can shimmer at the lip of threat. When rhyme strains or snaps—under friction, under force—it carries the sting of consequence: the pattern buckling under the weight of real life. Millner, skilled as a composer, knows exactly when to tune the music, when to fracture it, and when to let the seams unravel.

Millner blurs the boundary between poetry and prose, paralleling how her narrator navigates the blurred lines between intention and impulse. Some passages slip into almost conversational clarity; others flare into dizzying lyricism. Even the book’s most musical moments feel like strategic self-constructions, as the narrator tries—and sometimes fails—to shape a story clean enough to believe in. The tightness of the couplets becomes its own quiet confession: that the narrator’s language, like her love, can sometimes be untrustworthy.

There’s breathtaking intimacy in how Couplets renders queerness—not just the fevered dream of first queer love but the slow heartbreak of remapping oneself around that love. In Millner’s hands, queerness is less a revelation than a destabilization— not a fixed arrival point, but an open wound, a reordering still in progress. The narrator's shifting relationship to her own language—how she confesses, conceals, and reconceives—proves as tense and as tender as her relationships with others. And when the rhymes begin to fracture, it feels less like a literary experiment and more like a human heart stuttering, an identity unspooling with uneven breath and a terrible, breathless honesty.

If you’re looking for a triumphant coming-out story, Couplets may challenge your expectations, but it does so with exquisite beauty. It reveals what survives after reinvention's shimmering promise gives way to the messier music of real life: loneliness, contradiction, and the half-songs of longing we hum. This is a book about falling apart and the fragile, ferocious labour of becoming again.

Millner leaves the ending tender, unfinished, and true to the story's belief that becoming is never a clean victory, only an endless, vulnerable act of persistence. She has written this tale for anyone who loved badly but dreamed defiantly, for anyone whose story was too wild, too intimate, too unfinished to ever fully master its telling. She offers us harmony and fracture, resonance and rawness, and in the process she creates something so clear and searingly honest that it aches.

History murmurs beneath waves,

slow waters shaping silently,

a quiet riot of ambition,

rhythms rewriting stone and soil,

kingdoms softly spun, undone

in echoes louder than their rise,

cycles swift as shifting tides.

Characters tread shadowed roads,

footsteps fading, heavy with desire,

edges sharp yet known, familiar,

mirrors revealing clearer truths—

fragments reflecting regret,

shadows stretching, breaking,

guiding gently by the hand

toward understanding.

Parker-Chan’s prose flows softly,

slipping smoothly through defenses,

subtle tensions shimmering

beneath careful sentences,

meanings gleaming quietly,

revelations whispering,

waiting beneath certainties.

At the core, queer authenticity

pulses fiercely, love fractured

yet resilient, radiant with scars,

betrayal’s blade cuts cleanly,

bonds mend stronger,

marked by wounds and wonder.

Ultimately, you’ll sink willingly,

trusting these waters,

drifting deeper, breathing clearer,

surfacing transformed—

world remade, reshaped,

reborn from quiet depths.