Sapphopunk: How Sappho Almost Became a Stone Femme, a Fiction in Honor of Otherness, an Experiment in Dignity or Sappho’s Queer

Poetry. "SAPPHOPUNK is a vivid, visceral experiment in ’somatic abundance,’ a hybrid text blurring prose, poetry, history, and theater. Set in a sensual, imaginary academy, hastain’s text describes a teacher, S, who ’conjures cooperative thrive’ among her female students. Their idyllic rituals are disrupted when S encounters Phaon, an ’outcast’ whose gender play disturbs the initiations S orchestrates. ’Can S conceive of a reason to transcend the anatomy of her academy?’ asks hastain. What’s at stake here is how to value lesbian literary history built on gender binaries while simultaneously writing queer literature that interrogates those binaries."—Carol Guess