GLR March-April 2026

C HARLES G REEN OUTLIVING MICHAEL by Steven Reigns Moon Tide Press. 92 pages, $16.95 O Reigns captures Michael Church in his fullness. A travel agent with a wicked sense of humor and eclectic tastes, Michael passed along wisdom and bad jokes. His personality comes across from the beginning, in a note he leaves to Reigns: “I have 2 subjects for you to write about—me, of course, and me!” After this, Reigns pictures a younger Michael at Studio 54, employed to collect bottles but more often dancing and enjoying the party. Michael had a full, colorful life. His drag persona Blanche was “notorious” in Naples, Florida, an elegant appearance he assumed to deliver campy retorts. Reigns first encountered Michael drunk on a barstool, his wig sliding off. Driving home from visiting Reigns once, Michael was cruised, hooking up UTLIVING MICHAEL is a touching, reflective collec tion of poems remembering a dear friend lost to AIDS. In clear, direct lines, almost like prose, poet Steven link that doesn’t work.” Sycamore’s tongue-in-cheek perspective does much to re lieve the intensity of the novel’s events. She playfully interro gates binary thinking using phrases such as “There are two types of galleries” and “There are two kinds of club children.” A dog matic character says to Terry: “you either believe in the tyranny of the state or you don’t.” Deadpan humor punctuates Terry’s mother Paula’s response after Terry’s first-grade teachers suspect her of having a learn ing disability for calling boys “she.” Terry matter-of-factly re calls: “Paula said we live in a world of the universal she, but your school doesn’t understand that.” Later in the novel, upon observing someone in a park using a football as a pillow, Terry remarks: “this might be the first time I’ve found anything even remotely interesting about a football.” Such drollness adds to the pervasive and incisive political commentary to engage read ers on several levels at once. Disarmingly, Terry regularly ad dresses the reader directly and confidentially, using expressions like “I just want to tell you,” “Don’t let me forget,” and “Do you see how it was getting confusing?” This tone produces a beguiling sense of intimacy with the character. While the novel’s concluding park scenes in 2020 Seattle can feel slow, Terry’s funny, keen perspective carries the day. Not surprisingly, the novel avoids easy resolutions. Instead, it offers a refreshing look at the life of a resilient, clear-eyed sur vivor who’s living life on her own terms, without apology and with a deep understanding of human inconsistencies and im perfections. Readers can fly through this novel on Terry Dactyl’s wings and land on the earth wiser and satisfied. _________________________________________________________________ Anne Charles, who lives in Montpelier, VT, cohosts (with her partner) the cable-access show All Things LGBTQ . Ode to Flamboyance

A NNE C HARLES Between the Plagues

TERRY DACTYL byMa tti lda Bernstein Sycamore Co ff ee House Press. 260 pages, $18. M excess, and drugs. This beginning invites readers into the world of Terry Dactyl, the trans lesbian narrator whose (mis)adven tures are the subject of the tale. Like its heroine, very little about this novel is conventional. It’s told in a conversational stream of-consciousness style, the action jumps back and forth in time, dialogue is not punctuated, numbered lists appear as part of a story, and a Zoom call is presented as a theatrical script. One sentence can span paragraphs or even pages. These devices pro duce a swift momentum that drives the narrative forward. Terry has been raised by lesbian mothers in Seattle, wit nessing the AIDS epidemic that killed many of her mothers’ friends. The specter of AIDS haunts the novel. After she moves to New York and drops out of college, Terry immerses herself in a club scene marked by extravagant costuming and heavy drug use. Terry’s chosen family mourns deaths by AIDS, sui cide, and drug overdoses as they struggle to navigate a some times violent urban terrain with style. Much attention is paid to sartorial ornamentation, including Terry’s wings, a key marker and a central metaphor. Terry’s work at a prestigious Soho art gallery gives Sycamore occasion for much satirical skewering of the New York art world. The novel’s second half finds Terry back in Seattle in 2020 amid the Covid pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests. Sycamore brings her keen observational skills to bear in her treatment of the fears and panic that attended the pandemic. Terry describes the early deaths in nursing homes and on cruise ships and the angry localized mask disputes. Sycamore rein forces the isolation imposed by the pandemic by regularly be ginning sentences with the phrase “Things that make me feel less lonely tonight,” followed by a list of locations, sensations, and soon. Despite the national social-distancing mandate, Terry finds political community in the George Floyd protests that engulfed Seattle in 2020. The irony that protesters are gassed by Seat tle’s lesbian mayor—a friend of Terry’s mothers—is not lost on her. She drily notes: “Across the country, we have lesbian may ors, gay mayors, Black mayors, progressive mayors, and all their favorite police chiefs, united in their love of tear gas.” The political demonstrations coincide with the Northwest wildfires to turn Seattle into an environmental hellscape. This circum stance causes Terry to self-referentially quip: “Apparently, when you obsessively refresh the air quality report, this doesn’t im prove the air quality.” She later declares: “Yes, I’m delighted to receive an email from my health insurance company with the subject line, ‘Learn about your mental health options,’ and a ATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE’s absorbing novel opens on the dancefloor of New York’s Lime light, the iconic nightclub known for its theatricality,

March–April 2026

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