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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.
28 pages, Paperback
First published March 3, 2020
24 people are currently reading
4145 people want to read
About the author
Sabrina Imbler
4 books264 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 200 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
November 10, 2024
gay volcano book! imbler's prose is incredible, cycling effortlessly between scientific geology talk and deeply personal memoir/autofiction.
i love a good extended metaphor that also works as a pun. and there's a lot here. talk of the human-constructed binary between rocks and crystals killed me.
i love a good extended metaphor that also works as a pun. and there's a lot here. talk of the human-constructed binary between rocks and crystals killed me.
Dykes indicated that some significant tectonic event took place long ago. Either the Earth's crusts reached toward each other, creating mountain ranges like interlocked fingers across a table. Or the crusts pulled apart, thinning to the point of a valley like the sagging blanket between two bodies on either side of a bed.
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, 2025
I don't have words to review this yet. I will reread it soon and review it.
October 7, 2023
poc lesbians in science who also happen to be essayists are so important to society. this was gorgeous thank you sabrina
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.
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!
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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."
March 12, 2021
wow what next level prose. I’m going to need a minute.
August 8, 2023
shes just like me (a 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!!
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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?
January 16, 2025
Sabrina Imbler’s writing makes the inner workings of my brain feel so seen. Yes, volcanoes are lesbians! Olivia read it aloud to me on FaceTime which made it all the better. I learned that my lava flow ring that looks like tinfoil that I wear everyday could technically be a dyke.
March 4, 2022
A perfect essay. Smart, sexy and sad
May 7, 2024
Oh my god?????
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September 11, 2024Var norrsken tre gånger så ljust och starkt när dinosaurierna levde????????
Jag vet inte riktigt vad jag förväntade mig. Inte riktigt det här men den var fin.
Smart och fin! Kul att kombinera ämnen som vid första anblick inte har något med varandra att göra.
Oväntat kort haha
Jag vet inte riktigt vad jag förväntade mig. Inte riktigt det här men den var fin.
Smart och fin! Kul att kombinera ämnen som vid första anblick inte har något med varandra att göra.
Oväntat kort haha
July 15, 2025
More of a gay breakup essay than anything else but one of the better breakup essays that I’ve read. Quite impressed by how seamless they made the transitions between rocks and lesbians and the writing was pretty in an internalized homophobia sapphic way. I think if I cared more about sex I might give it more stars
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!!!!!!!
July 15, 2025
kinda reads like when i’m studying for a test so i start personifying concepts so i can remember them more easily
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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 😭
December 1, 2021
Dyke (Geology) by Sabrina Imbler alternates between the lives of a queer Hawaiian volcano and a gay woman. Totaling only 24-pages, this chapbook tackles the big questions of everything from life as a queer woman, love, to the formation of galaxies and volcanoes. If there is any flaw with this chapbook, it lies solely in the marketing. The publisher’s website lists this book as fiction, while the synopsis on the same site mentions that it is a blend of autofiction and science writing. After taking into consideration the fusion of genres, I was still unprepared for what this book had to offer.
Like the geological dykes woven throughout the narrative, Dyke (Geology) defies expectations. If you are looking for traditional fiction—with a clear three-act structure and dialogue—this is not for you. Dyke (Geology) mimics literary nonfiction, but Imbler’s liberal use of lyrical sentences resembles poetry. The chapbook blends science writing with contemporary fiction. However, the portions that lean towards fiction—where the reader experiences the life of a queer woman and her relationships in snapshots—read like a memoir. Dyke (Geology) is hard to pin to one genre, or even two, which makes it challenging to read at first. It took a second time reading through the book to appreciate Imbler’s poetic brevity and scientific research.
The true strength of Dyke (Geology) lies in its use of metaphor. It takes concepts like stars and the formation of galaxies, the difference between crystals and minerals (honestly, it really is a silly binary), and blends them into the life of a queer woman. The formation of galaxies becomes the collision of love and losing oneself. Sex toys become crystals. The rocks and minerals a lover climbs are personal and not tangible. The comparisons Imbler draws are taken further than surface-level analogies. They artfully wield these metaphors, weaving poetic language into them, to pull the reader into a world that feels beautiful and recognizable—and at the same time, altogether too honest and raw.
The summary of Dyke (Geology) fails to capture the heart of this chapbook. It is the unassuming must-read for anyone interested in queer literature. Readers of both science writing and poetry will find a new favorite in this chapbook, as the lyrical writing breathes life into seismology and the formation of coral around sinking volcanoes. And those who enjoy reading slice-of-life stories will appreciate the sections focused on the unnamed queer woman because they ache with familiarity and truth. Dyke (Geology) brings something unexpected and new to the table and is worth taking part of the afternoon to read (and maybe read again).
Dyke (Geology) is published by Black Lawrence Press and was released in March 2020.
This review was originally submitted as an assignment for one of my university courses.
Like the geological dykes woven throughout the narrative, Dyke (Geology) defies expectations. If you are looking for traditional fiction—with a clear three-act structure and dialogue—this is not for you. Dyke (Geology) mimics literary nonfiction, but Imbler’s liberal use of lyrical sentences resembles poetry. The chapbook blends science writing with contemporary fiction. However, the portions that lean towards fiction—where the reader experiences the life of a queer woman and her relationships in snapshots—read like a memoir. Dyke (Geology) is hard to pin to one genre, or even two, which makes it challenging to read at first. It took a second time reading through the book to appreciate Imbler’s poetic brevity and scientific research.
The true strength of Dyke (Geology) lies in its use of metaphor. It takes concepts like stars and the formation of galaxies, the difference between crystals and minerals (honestly, it really is a silly binary), and blends them into the life of a queer woman. The formation of galaxies becomes the collision of love and losing oneself. Sex toys become crystals. The rocks and minerals a lover climbs are personal and not tangible. The comparisons Imbler draws are taken further than surface-level analogies. They artfully wield these metaphors, weaving poetic language into them, to pull the reader into a world that feels beautiful and recognizable—and at the same time, altogether too honest and raw.
The summary of Dyke (Geology) fails to capture the heart of this chapbook. It is the unassuming must-read for anyone interested in queer literature. Readers of both science writing and poetry will find a new favorite in this chapbook, as the lyrical writing breathes life into seismology and the formation of coral around sinking volcanoes. And those who enjoy reading slice-of-life stories will appreciate the sections focused on the unnamed queer woman because they ache with familiarity and truth. Dyke (Geology) brings something unexpected and new to the table and is worth taking part of the afternoon to read (and maybe read again).
Dyke (Geology) is published by Black Lawrence Press and was released in March 2020.
This review was originally submitted as an assignment for one of my university courses.
May 29, 2025
Really trying to hold myself back from saying, "I dig it." But, alas, I am only human 😞
December 2, 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 pebbles 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:)
September 21, 2020
so hot, so scientific. absolutely gorgeous.
April 10, 2024
if you like queer women AND rocks, boy do i have the book rec for you!!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 200 reviews