Leah Komar

Dec 14, 2023 | strangehorizons.com | H. B. Asari |Devan Barlow |Leah Komar |Rachel Cordasco

When I picked up Shubnum Khan’s The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, I found it very hard to put down again. It reminded me of the time in my early twenties when I read a lot of postcolonial and emigrant novels, with bonus points for poetic style and themes of star-crossed lovers, as in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet [1999] and Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter [2001], or sprinkled with a smattering of fantasy and magic, most notably some cherry-picked Alice Hoffman novels.

Dec 12, 2023 | strangehorizons.com | Devan Barlow |H. B. Asari |Leah Komar |Rachel Cordasco

I approach my moon’s apiary,hive-sanctuaryA hummingof hive magicplays along my skinThe bees sheltered in the treeswhen they brought us to these moonsQueens continued rulingYellow and black shaded tosilver and tealI bow to the bees,thanking them for pollinatingasking for honeyTo crystallize the citrus peelsour witch-work requiresSmall forms swirl around my faceflicking wings, brushing antennaelike gentle kissesTheir buzz pours into my earsmatching the thump of my heart

Dec 12, 2023 | strangehorizons.com | Leah Komar |H. B. Asari |Devan Barlow |Rachel Cordasco

No one knows why worker bees leave when they leavethere’s plenty of food, an intact hive, a queen, larvae, nurses for the larvae but worker bee says: you can’t love something if you aren’t afraid to lose it. I was born holding a knife and as soon as I use it, I’ll die.

Dec 12, 2023 | strangehorizons.com | H. B. Asari |Devan Barlow |Leah Komar |Rachel Cordasco

The first and last time the sisters met was decades ago when they were seven. Their father, Olikoli, had picked them up from their mothers—Aimerienina from her human mother on the mainland, then Ngasiena from her Njeri mother in the Silts—and taken them to one of the only swimming pools that dialled down its chlorination on Sunday mornings for Njeri and overcharged them for it.

Dec 11, 2023 | strangehorizons.com | Rachel Cordasco |H. B. Asari |Devan Barlow |Leah Komar

I was excited to read this collection by Gabriela Damián Miravete, in part because she is a vibrant, intriguing author, but also because I fondly remember meeting her at WisCon 43 in 2019, when she was presented with the Otherwise Award for this volume’s title story. First published in English and Spanish in Latin American Literature Today (2018) and translated by Adrian Demopulos, “They Will Dream” is a haunting story about violence against women in Mexico.