Dominant Genes

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. There is hope in this collection, and the lead weight of expectation, and warm moments of empathy too. 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. Thematically linked and stylistically nimble, Sindu's work explores ancient stories, personal experiences growing up as a queer person in Sri Lanka and the US, and questions around racial, familial, and queer identities. It blurs genre and gender, offering a profound inquiry into inheritance, legacy, and self.