Winner of the Fall 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition
Dominant Genes, the new hybrid collection from Stonewall Honor author and Lambda Literary Award finalist SJ Sindu, is equal parts power and astonishing beauty, tenderness and shimmering anger, poetry and lyric essays interwoven in a gorgeous exploration of family, heritage, and the construction of nonbinary and queer identities. “ We learn our anger through osmosis,” Sindu writes of the inherited rage of South Asian women, “ or maybe it’ s in the breast milk, spreading through our veins long before we learn how to look only at the floor and walk without showing our ankles.”
There is hope in this collection, and the lead weight of expectation, and warm moments of empathy too. Thematically linked and stylistically nimble, Sindu’ s pieces play with the fragmentary nature of memory and identity, her speakers traversing with intelligence and compassion the complexities of mental health, love, and pressurized relationships with the people closest to us— those who love us intensely, even when they understand us the least.