Released at WisCon 36, Rose Lemberg’s short collection of speculative poetry Here, We Cross gathers poems that deal with issues of gender, sexuality, and identity from the seven current issues of Stone Telling Magazine. Readers familiar with “Queering SFF” will note that I have previously reviewed the queer-themed seventh issue—“Bridging”—for Poetry Month, and this recently-released collection contains those stellar poems as well as several more from across the history of the magazine. As Lemberg’s introduction notes, here you “will find poems with speakers or protagonists who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, asexual, and neutrois; speakers who struggle with the body and the society’s imposed readings of that body” (iv). This collection is concerned not only with sexuality but also with gender, and with the intersections and divergences of those two axes of identity.
[A review]