Say what you will about Scorpio people, but Scorpio themes make for heart-wrenching, compelling, juicy literature. Astrologer Chani Nicholas writes of “Scorpio’s underworld qualities, as well as its powers of regeneration.” Lately I’m fascinated by books featuring literal and psychological underworlds—which have captured the interest of readers and listeners for thousands of years, judging by the ancient Greek myth of Persephone and Hades, and the Mesopotamian myth of Inanna that preceded it. A person might become lost in an underworld, or else journey through one to discover something previously hidden about our own strength and resilience, and what we actually value.
Along with underworlds, Scorpio is associated with death and rebirth, something I took to heart while working on my poetry collection, Cosmic Tantrum: I spent years writing an initial version that I later threw away, starting over from scratch to make something that feels darker and more complex, more me. My birth chart shows four planets in my eighth house, which is ruled by Scorpio. The eighth house encompasses some of the thorniest and most intense aspects of life: death, yes, but also sexuality, transformation, taboos, the occult, other people’s money, and letting go of attachments. Having multiple planets in one house is called a stellium—or, as my tarot teacher and astrologer Jeff Hinshaw likes to say, a house party. I wanted my book to feel like that—like a cast of big personalities walking through a haunted house. And in this new form, it does: Big and Little Edie exchange psychic barbs in their crumbling Hamptons mansion, a “local beast” minds its own business while townsfolk enact a strongly worded letter, and an Eldest Daughter awakens from the sleepwalk of automatic compliance.
Some of the books below percolated in the back of my mind while I wrote Cosmic Tantrum and some have come to me more recently. Each has inspired me with its willingness to plumb the depths of human experience, to sit companionably with mystery, and to find home and self-possession in and through the shadows. All of these qualities embody Scorpio energy, while the subjects and events of the books—taboos, inheritances, death, transformation—are aligned with the eighth house. Each book on the list feels kindred. I’m a Jill of all genres, so rather than narrow the list to just poetry, fiction, or nonfiction, this list is a mixer. A house party, if you will.
A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton
For anyone who can remember when the internet was a still niche hideaway, a bodiless space, an actual alternate world, this novel will evoke a powerful nostalgia. Three queer teens—Abraxa, Sash, and Lilith—meet in a chat room in 1998 and collaborate on a mystical video game about an exiled sorceress. They have never seen each other. But in the anonymous spaces they frequent, they find transformative opportunities for self-invention that aren’t accessible in the physical world. And the game—the imaginary world as they create it—offers a kind of psychic refuge. Underworld journeys abound in these pages: digital caves and dungeons, dark-night-of-the-soul reckonings with the self, and, at one point, a very occult basement dwelling.
Bestiary by Donika Kelly
This gutting poetry collection takes the form of a medieval bestiary—a catalogue of real and mythical animals, each imparting a lesson or moral. It takes this form even as the form collapses, as it paradoxes, as it resists its own rules, the way the tools we create to survive an experience later hinder us once we’re safe and no longer need them. A protective shell we must break so we can grow. By observing and taking on the attributes of animals (“I thought myself lion and serpent,” “You have a howl for this dark well”), the speaker reckons with childhood sexual abuse and reclaims personal sovereignty, lust, joy, learning to live “in the full / throat of summer.”
Bianca by Eugenia Leigh
This poetry collection confronts an inheritance of violence and the underworld journey to break that cycle while “managing motherhood, marriage, and mental illness.” Bianca is the name Leigh gave her alter ego—“My fever, my havoc, my tilt”—while experiencing mania from not-yet-diagnosed Bipolar Disorder and C-PTSD. Leigh writes with warm, clear-eyed tenacity about the emotional and physical abuse she experienced as a child and its effects on her ability to forge a self, to muscle for herself a future in which she might continue to exist. New motherhood raises the stakes even higher and deepens her resolve: “I am not the thing / my child will have to survive.”
Bruja by Wendy C. Ortiz
Originally published in 2016 and being rereleased this year by Northwestern University Press, Bruja takes the form of a dreamoir, a narrative built through a chronological catalogue of the author’s dreams. Some names are redacted, and there’s no introduction to orient a reader into the dream world before it offers itself up to us, but what we’re given feels so intimate: a self making subconscious sense of itself. It feels taboo to be able to see that. Classic death/rebirth/milestone images, ancient archetypes, and fraught feelings appear in Ortiz’s dreams—mother, murder, pregnancy, weddings, guilt, panic, “a dark and frothy tidepool”—and the sense of narrative builds from witnessing how these symbols and events recur, changed, over time. Most of the dreams have their feet planted in the mundane—a trip to the supermarket, conversations with friends, typing on a keyboard with missing keys—while always feeling vaguely mystical, like when the Corona beer ordered from a dream Taco Bell costs an angel-number-y $8.88.
Drawing Blood by Molly Crabapple
I turn to this book for a reread whenever I feel stalled out in my creative life. Crabapple’s story is one of constant reinvention and using unconventional means to obtain the results she desires. Needing subsistence money, art-supplies money, and time in which to create, a young Crabapple supplements her illustration income with odd jobs as a “professional naked girl,” posing nude for sketch artists and “guys with cameras,” and as a model for SuicideGirls: “When I thought of every proposition or threat that I got just walking down the street in my girl body, I decided I might as well get paid for the trouble.” One of my favorite moments is when Crabapple branches out into journalism and her editors are aghast at her willingness to scrap drafts and start over from scratch, the way one must with visual art: a “draft” dies but is resurrected with the next blank page.
Dreaming of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva
This novel in verse hits so many eighth house marks. Death and rebirth are literal here, as the poet-protagonist conducts a séance to resurrect Selena Quintanilla, looks death in the face, and enjoys the drama of Spanish songs, where “Everything is / a stage, I guess, or the altar we die on.” In poems where a kidnapping is mistaken for a date, a shadow self floats over the speaker, the poet isn’t sure how to be a gracious host to Selena, and Yolanda explains being “weak / with want,” there’s a pervasive feeling of fearing what one desires, and desiring what one fears.
Evil Eye by Etaf Rum
In this novel, Yara, a young Palestinian American wife and mother, struggles to want the life she is living. Her grandmother, who reads Turkish coffee grounds, foresaw trouble the day Yara’s mother was to be married. Her mother believes the whole line is cursed. On paper, Yara meets the acceptable-life milestones: she has a career of her own, a breadwinner husband, two young daughters. But she despairs against patriarchal messages that her career—something that’s solely hers—is a frivolous distraction from complete devotion to her family and maintaining a perfect home. She receives these messages through subtle and not-so-subtle criticisms from extended family. Additionally, as she looks into her past for possible sources for her unhappiness, Yara confronts abuse in her childhood home in the U.S., and her mother’s suffering in her marriage, as well as her grandmother’s life in a refugee camp, one of the devastating impacts of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. What’s a curse and what’s inherited trauma? For Yara, the distinctions are blurred or unnecessary as she tries to break the cycle.
Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates
I couldn’t make a Scorpio list without including Gabrielle Bates, who is a Scorpio, and whose debut poetry collection, Judas Goat, goes straight to the underworlds of sexuality, death, betrayal, and forced obedience, and asks, “Without violence, how do I understand my life as meaningful?” This book examines with a magnifying glass the casual cruelty of nature and human nature— a “Judas goat” is the goat trained to lead the sheep to slaughter—but it’s also a love story. It’s true that “what the self forms around / cannot be undone,” but how terrifying and how tender to open to the possibility of loving and being loved, and allowing yourself to be seen by another.
Toska by Alina Pleskova
“At Riis / with you, tits out & facing heavenward, I regard my debts to our legion.” This chatty, melancholy, yearning poetry collection considers queerness, what is inherited from homelands, what we can’t take with us to “the other side of the veil,” passing around the same twenty dollars, and how Eros is not the only or most important desire, of all the ones that can sustain us. Toska is jaded about the long-term viability of the American experiment, and skeptical of borders in general, reminding us of what’s more handleable in front of our faces: the present moment, sensual pleasures, holding each other when and how we can.
Whip Smart by Melissa Febos
This memoir largely takes places in dungeons (not below a castle; this one is in a Midtown Manhattan office building) as Febos, new to New York City and open to unusual work to support herself in college, becomes a professional dominatrix. She takes on the job under the belief that she is a “cultural anthropologist,” observing and facilitating the transaction of other people’s vices, but she soon finds herself slogging through the underworld of addiction, not sure when or if she’ll find her exit. From addiction, and from the work, which loses its novelty and starts to feel cloying and claustrophobia-inducing. What I love about this memoir is Febos’s initial intense curiosity about this unfamiliar-to-her world, and the hard-won self-knowledge she obtains. Also: her lifelong obsession with secrets and being a secret-keeper—very writerly and very Scorpio, prizing mystery, that which is occulted from view.
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