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Dyke [geology]
Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. Through intertwined threads of autofiction, lyric science writing, and the tale of a newly queer Hawaiian volcano, Sabrina Imbler delivers a coming out story on a geological time scale. This is a small book that tackles large, wholly human questions--what it means to live and date under white supremacy, to never know if one is loved or fetishized, how to navigate fierce desires and tectonic heartbreak through the rise and eventual eruption of a first queer love."When two galaxies stray too near each other, the attraction between them can be so strong that the galaxies latch on and never let go. Sometimes the pull triggers head-on wrecks between stars--galactic collisions--throwing bodies out of orbit, seamlessly into space. Sometimes the attraction only creates a giant black hole, making something whole into a kind of missing." In vivid, tensile prose, DYKE (GEOLOGY) subverts the flat, neutral language of scientific journals to explore what it means to understand the Earth as something queer, volatile, and disruptive.
24 pages, Paperback
First published March 3, 2020
About the author
Sabrina Imbler
3 books199 followersSabrina Imbler is a writer and science journalist living in Brooklyn. Their first chapbook, Dyke (geology) was published by Black Lawrence Press. They have received fellowships and scholarships from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Tin House, the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat, Millay Arts, and Paragraph NY, and their work has been supported by the Café Royal Cultural Foundation. Their essays and reporting have appeared in various publications, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, Catapult, and Sierra, among others.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 136 reviews
October 8, 2021
Read this book at my funeral and then throw my ashes into a volcano (because volcanos are gay and so am I)
October 3, 2022
Cringe at some parts in a wasian diaspora poetry way, touching and relatable in others in a chinese dyke solidarity way
January 11, 2023
A stunning, polished essay about dyke matters — literally — across the globe and throughout spacetime. Imbler weaves personal stories of love and heartbreak with those of an earth continually making, unmaking, and rebreaking itself — a queer earth that refuses steadiness under the weight of white supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy.
February 20, 2024
queering geography is cool, and the book was definitely at its best when imbler leaned into that. ideally all of my books would be mostly esoterica & gay sex.
otherwise Don’t Be Mad but it really did read like an undergrad CNF paper To Me. this did cause me to look up their environmental journalism & i cannot recommend it enough. i suspect their other book is more my speed.
you know what. every dyke should be able to publish their self indulgent breakup manuscript.
otherwise Don’t Be Mad but it really did read like an undergrad CNF paper To Me. this did cause me to look up their environmental journalism & i cannot recommend it enough. i suspect their other book is more my speed.
you know what. every dyke should be able to publish their self indulgent breakup manuscript.
February 20, 2023
Delightful little chapbook that queers geological time and space with a fluid combination of autofiction, science writing, and the lesbian audacity to situate profundity in puns. Centering the experiences of its half-chinese narrator and a gay volcano in Hawaii* that are both pitted against a white supremacist heteropatriarchy, dyke (geology) folds feeling into and upon itself, courses with stratas of meaning both personal and political, and erupts with a triumphant new mythology of the world that has been ready, for at least 780,000 years, for its own coming out.
*I couldn't help but think of Geryon, from Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red. I do love me a gay volcano!
*I couldn't help but think of Geryon, from Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red. I do love me a gay volcano!
March 1, 2023
I wonder if I will recover that feeling of attraction, of being pulled outside myself without foresight or hesitation. Of succumbing entirely to longing, dormant for as long as I can remember.
i love this thing that happens where any book written by lesbians about lesbians for lesbians somehow causes the person writing the blurb/summary/foreword to throw around the word 'queer' one hundred million times to aggressively overcompensate for its explicit lesbian specificity. and by love i mean i wish i could set fire to the earth. what an especially absurd description for a book where the writer overtly laments the collective inability to associate lesbianism "with the work of a woman they admire ... [doing] anything, it seems, to retrieve her from this genre."
is any of that pertinent to a review? no but fortunately i am not a professional reviewer, just a curmudgeonly dyke using goodreads to catalog every thought that crosses her mind.
i think this review just about sums up how i feel. as a gay scientist and enjoyer of poetry, poetic interpretations of natural phenomenon are, as the kids say, my jam, so i was quite charmed by the concept of this book. and it has its moments but overall - its ... corny. i suspect i've also hit my personal saturation point with these "women of color bemoan their inferiority to white women who will never love them back" type narratives but ymmv and all that.
also: your partner choking and hitting you in bed is always bad regardless of her race. its not just the racial dynamic that makes it harmful to you. christ.
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May 5, 2021Surprisingly funny. Basically an extended pun on the word "dyke," and I admire that. Didn't feel super strongly about it overall, but I couldn't not read a book whose author, when asked what the book was about, replied, "A gay volcano."
January 5, 2024
thank you charlene!!! have just gotten around to this quick but poignant read. i found it aptly gay and scientific as the title alludes.
falls into that similar theme of queer poc and battling their fascination with whiteness that was present in “into the dream house”.
geology as an extended metaphor was perf! i know what kind of video essays sabrina imbler watches!
falls into that similar theme of queer poc and battling their fascination with whiteness that was present in “into the dream house”.
geology as an extended metaphor was perf! i know what kind of video essays sabrina imbler watches!
June 14, 2023
That was so pretty and special :,) Everything Sabrina Imbler writes seems to lie at the exact intersection of two of my most prominent identities: gay and woman in stem lol
March 22, 2024
This teeters closer to the 3.5 range when the ‘science facts as metaphors for life’ are pushed too far (and I love science facts as metaphors for life!!) or when some of the language around identity feels more academic than lived. However, some very lovely writing overall!!
October 7, 2023
poc lesbians in science who also happen to be essayists are so important to society. this was gorgeous thank you sabrina
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February 6, 2021Twitter led me to Sabrina Imbler's recent piece "Inside the Blue Hole" (https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/ins...), and I was pretty instantly sold on this way of writing about science and ordered the chapbook and that is how we got here. Imbler is not afraid--and I mean not at all--to use the natural world in service of personal metaphor. But you know what, I'm here for it. I love the factoids. I love scale of galaxies applied to the scale of the interpersonal. I love the wry humor that nabs you ("If there were stone butches, there may well be granite dykes." ...Call me easily amused, but I think I laughed for like a week.) And I really, really love this cover art, right?
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December 12, 2023“In the years after, she will take her final breath and spend the last of her days encased in reef, coral blooming in her fissures where the eggs of so many fish will hatch and bob and drift into the blue. The sweet and deafening blue.”
March 4, 2022
A perfect essay. Smart, sexy and sad
April 17, 2023
corto pero bonito. cuenta pedazos de historia y como se relacionan con los volcanes y la geología, está muy legible, entendible, tierno y sensible.
February 24, 2024
czemu tak krótko!!!!!!!
March 22, 2024
So much shorter than I expected (I want more…) and yet by virtue of that, so sweet. This made me sad and happy and longing and fulfilled all at once, made me tingle all over, neurons firing like little streams and pebble of emotion skittering down the rivulets of my brain. A strange way of feeling on the 49.
(Sabrina, give me a novel already!)
Big thanks to Maya for loaning me her copy:)
(Sabrina, give me a novel already!)
Big thanks to Maya for loaning me her copy:)
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December 28, 2022idk like. not that i hated it but this did not live up to its fullest potential that is for sure 😭😭😭 maybe also bc of how much i liked the premise but like 😭😭 idk it’s cool that someone is doing this stuff though 😭
September 21, 2020
so hot, so scientific. absolutely gorgeous.
March 12, 2021
wow what next level prose. I’m going to need a minute.
January 6, 2022
tldr: volcanoes are pretty fucking gay!!!!!!
i’ve been following sabrina’s work on twitter for a while and loved their science writing and personal essays, so when i found out they had a chapbook i knew i had to read it!! read this fragmentedly—first by listening to sabrina themself read two big excerpts on youtube, and then ordering the ebook and devouring the rest over lunch break today!! this is some of the most beautiful writing i’ve ever seen — i’ve been thinking of the multiple meanings of the word “dyke” since we learned of river dykes in form 2 geography, a time when i was a pretty closeted ~dyke~ as well, so i’m so glad to see this chapbook basically play on that pun for the entirety of its 24 (?) pages. as a queer naturalist (ish) myself, it’s so refreshing to see somebody link natural phenomena to extremely personal & queer experiences so seamlessly and with such beautiful prose <3 <3
i’ve been following sabrina’s work on twitter for a while and loved their science writing and personal essays, so when i found out they had a chapbook i knew i had to read it!! read this fragmentedly—first by listening to sabrina themself read two big excerpts on youtube, and then ordering the ebook and devouring the rest over lunch break today!! this is some of the most beautiful writing i’ve ever seen — i’ve been thinking of the multiple meanings of the word “dyke” since we learned of river dykes in form 2 geography, a time when i was a pretty closeted ~dyke~ as well, so i’m so glad to see this chapbook basically play on that pun for the entirety of its 24 (?) pages. as a queer naturalist (ish) myself, it’s so refreshing to see somebody link natural phenomena to extremely personal & queer experiences so seamlessly and with such beautiful prose <3 <3
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November 10, 2023”Alphonse Borrelly, the Frenchman who discovered 99 Dike, named her after the ancient Greek goddess of moral justice and judgement, which makes a great deal of sense if you’ve ever met a lesbian.”
*
”The contested etymology of the word dyke contains, in my humble opinion, far too many theories. Some claim the term originates from the mid-nineteenth century American dike, slang for a man wearing his best clothes out on the town. Others cite that bulldyker preceedes dyke in print, in a passage in Claude McKay’s 1928 Home to Harlem, wherein the author conflates the term with lesbian. These same scholars point to the occasional conflation of dike with vagina and bull with aggressive. No one ever points to to geology, that rock that dared defy another rock in a radical kind of perpendicular.”
*
”The contested etymology of the word dyke contains, in my humble opinion, far too many theories. Some claim the term originates from the mid-nineteenth century American dike, slang for a man wearing his best clothes out on the town. Others cite that bulldyker preceedes dyke in print, in a passage in Claude McKay’s 1928 Home to Harlem, wherein the author conflates the term with lesbian. These same scholars point to the occasional conflation of dike with vagina and bull with aggressive. No one ever points to to geology, that rock that dared defy another rock in a radical kind of perpendicular.”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 11, 2023
I really enjoyed Imbler's prose and writing style. I have never read anything like it. There is such heavy imagery, the emotions are so palpable. This tiny book felt like a living breathing entity on its own. There is essentially no plot, it creatively compares the struggles of a wasian lesbian to a gay volcano. The concept of a gay volcano is cool but the geology references flew over my head (I am not in the natural sciences for a reason.) But I really enjoyed reading the human parts. The usual whine and pine. I love all things created by women named Sabrina!
September 18, 2022
this was incredible, i devoured it in one sitting.
i first learnt of this chapbook months ago and immediately recommended it to my flatmate as it seemed engineered in a lab just for her. she loved it. what i didn't expect was how much i'd also enjoy it. it was so gay! so beautiful!
i love writing like this so much. lyrical, combines science and history with love and the personal. just delicious.
wanna go read everything imbler has ever written now. and get myself a copy of this.
i first learnt of this chapbook months ago and immediately recommended it to my flatmate as it seemed engineered in a lab just for her. she loved it. what i didn't expect was how much i'd also enjoy it. it was so gay! so beautiful!
i love writing like this so much. lyrical, combines science and history with love and the personal. just delicious.
wanna go read everything imbler has ever written now. and get myself a copy of this.
March 3, 2024
Please read diverse reviews.
As usual, this is not what I expected. For some reason I thought it was poetry so I was surprised to see it’s a long form essay of sorts, a collection of thoughts intermixing sex and geology. The author features exes and sex, and volcanoes. Really unique and quite enjoyable. A quick read but imagery that will stick with me.
As usual, this is not what I expected. For some reason I thought it was poetry so I was surprised to see it’s a long form essay of sorts, a collection of thoughts intermixing sex and geology. The author features exes and sex, and volcanoes. Really unique and quite enjoyable. A quick read but imagery that will stick with me.
July 29, 2021
I loved this little book. Volcanoes are so amazing. Lesbians are so amazing. Sabrina Imbler is the most amazing.
March 3, 2023
So dense while so small! This was an amazing read. Somehow so full of facts and feeling all blended together.
May 7, 2023
We’ll-written and never read anything like it before! Initially I was a bit underwhelmed by this essay, but it grew on me after I sat with it for a bit (which is honestly very fitting given the content!).
July 31, 2023
so so so so gorgeous
February 10, 2024
22 page book, enjoyed the literal and symbolic writing of this. Geology + lesbians + sex + white supremacy all interconnected through few words.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 136 reviews