Nimona: our favorite comic book murder girl and antihero teen with a secret heart of gold (kind of). I’ve loved her since the day my sister sent me a link to Stevenson’s incredible webcomic, and my love has only continued to grow as that webcomic turned into a graphic novel and now, finally, a movie. I doubt I’ll ever be able to recapture the magic of those early webcomic days since so much of what made it special was the community of commenters. (Bet those words will never come from my keyboard again.) Still, there are a lot of great graphic novels like Nimona out there featuring murder teens, unlikely friendships, queer pining, and unusual fantasy/sci-fi settings — not always in that order.

I have a lot of thoughts on graphic novels like Nimona and what makes them like Nimona, because it’s not just a matter of *hand-wave* magic and technology and supervillains. But first, because we are in the Year of Our Lord 2023 and live in a dystopian capitalist hellscape where billionaires refuse to pay their employees fair wages, we have to talk strikes.

Regarding the current WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes: current guidelines do not advise boycotting streamers or struck content, and unless or until it’s called for it could do more harm than good. WGA member and author Neil Gaiman posted on his Tumblr to say that watching content from struck studios/streamers doesn’t constitute “crossing the picket line,” and that “until the WGA calls for it, I don’t suggest doing it.”

If you’d like to support the writers and actors who make great media like Nimona, consider donating to the Entertainment Community Fund to support creatives as they fight for fair pay and conditions. That’s likely the best way to help at the moment.

Now on to the fun stuff: graphic novels like Nimona for all of you out there who just can’t get enough!

My husband and I are currently watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, me for the first time, him for about the billionth. After watching one episode where religious fundamentalists insist that the space station’s school teach their holy stories instead of scientific fact, and bomb the school when the teacher doesn’t agree, my husband leaned over to me and commented “But you know, Star Trek was never political.”

“[Sci fi story] was never political” is a running joke of ours, usually said with an eye roll and a bitter laugh at the complaint du jour about sci-fi stories that dare to centre anyone who isn’t a white, cishet man. Sci-fi has been decried as “political” for telling stories about people of colour or women (and predictably, some of the worst backlashes have come when a central character happens to be a woman of colour). Stories have been panned or banned for including LGBTQ+ people and relationships.

Writers who share the marginalisations of their characters are at the greatest risk of being harassed and attacked for daring to publish in a space that reactionary gatekeepers see as “theirs”. The ‘Sad Puppies’ campaign was a coordinated attempt by right-wing, “anti-diversity” pundits to influence the results of the Hugo Awards and push works by authors of colour, women, and LGBTQ+ people to the sidelines. Fortunately, it was unsuccessful — and not only because it was a clumsy, transparent attempt at attacking diversity. The fact is that sci-fi has never been a white, cishet, male, or conservative domain. It has always been a space for subversion, radical thinking, and rebelliousness — and marginalised people have been there from the beginning.

While Cavendish and Shelley were both upper-class women with financial resources, they were still women writing at times when only men’s writing was considered to be worthy (the Bronte sisters, writing 30 years later than Shelley, still had to publish under male pseudonyms to be taken seriously, while Jane Austen, whose life overlapped with Shelley’s, published anonymously). Literature as a field was not open to women, and yet women writers had a huge influence in kickstarting the sci-fi genre. Not only that, but continuing it with the works of writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, and many others writing in the mid-20th century, when sci-fi had truly come into its own as a genre.

I know what you might be thinking. You’re imagining a poem, all dressed in a tuxedo or an evening gown, ready to celebrate the next winner of the Pulitzer Prize. While it’s a fun image, particularly depending on the shape of the poem you’re imagining, that’s not what “formal poetry” means.

A formal poem is one that sticks to a particular form. It could be a Shakespearean or Italian sonnet. It could be the ghazal, villanelle, rondeau, or sestina. The poem could take one of many Japanese forms like the haiku or tanka. There are also more recently created forms like the golden shovel. What we’re not talking about are “free verse” poems that don’t pay much attention to form or line control.

As you can imagine, much of poetry has moved away from these strict forms. But in formal poetry, poets can actually find a fun challenge and a strange freedom that comes from it. And there are plenty of poets still writing in specific forms. Maybe those forms are older than any of us. Maybe those forms are brand new or even created just for the book they’re writing.

Either way, here are 10 amazing and modern formal poetry books.

I can’t remember the first book of hers I read — the one that made me realize that, for the next 25+ years, I would follow her anywhere — but that’s because all of Barbara Kingsolver’s books manage to make me feel some kind of way. And for a time there, back when I was in my late teens/early 20s, I was reading as many as I could get my hands on, all in quick succession.

Twenty-five years later, I can’t help feeling validated. This past spring, Kingsolver was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her most recent novel, Demon Copperhead, and it seems everyone is considering the title for their book clubs and bedside tables.

Demon Copperhead is a doorstopper of a book, a modern retelling of David Copperfield that provides a glimpse of what life is like for those touched by institutional poverty, and by the opioid epidemic, in the mountains of southern Appalachia. In this book, Kingsolver does what she’s always done best: She provides a lush, sweeping, engaging narrative that manages to interrogate larger cultural and systemic issues in a way that is not heavy-handed or overbearing.

But that’s not even what drew me to her work in the first place. Rather, I’ve always admired her ability to make me fall in love with places I’ve never seen. As a stubbornly indoorsy person, her work nevertheless makes me experience a reverence for our natural world that I find difficult to replicate when I’m soaking in my own boob sweat in my backyard.

Kingsolver has published 17 books since 1988, and I have more than half of them on my bookshelf, which made this post extremely difficult to write. (I know this might seem outrageous, but I’m not allowed to say, “Here! Read these 16 books first!”) After much deliberation, here are the titles I believe provide an ideal entry point into her work.

The Bronx party that launched an entire culture

June 24 – August 19, 2023