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This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 8 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2025.

IN GERUDO VALLEY

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This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 8 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2025.

Content Warning: sexual violence

Kissing Angelina

             from Belfast

She whispers bastard in my ear, her hands cupped tight,
breath hot, forbidden. I know a few swear words

and this one feels hollow, blank, but when mom says
That’s not a nice name to call someone, I know it’s a bad one,

it’s got weight. I keep it in my pocket for later when a boy
snakes his hand up my dress. For when a man presses too close

in the elevator. Say it in someone’s dark garage in high school.
Say it in the basement of the library. Say it to my husband.

Angelina has it in her pocket all along: embedded
in her hip bone, a quick-draw curse for her father,

her brother, her brother’s friends, friends’ brothers,
and the men who blew up the hair salon

where her best friend sat, spinning in a chair,
hair curled for communion.

Later, after the world has lifted its skirt to me and bared
its dark weapons, I will see a photo of her

and her daughter, still a baby, toothless and clean,
words slipping off her skin smooth as milk.

But for now, we will say the word over and over.
It tastes like smoke, spice, smells like Angelina’s

breath when it is close to my face in the bedroom
where midnight falls down around us

like so much pipe bomb shrapnel,
a girl’s soft hair, a girl’s parted lips.

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This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 8 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2025.

READING FRANKENSTEIN IN SEPTEMBER

Let me say that I too wanted to die. Wanted
to abandon my post, listening at the bathroom door

for the sound of my father finishing his work, expelling
the body’s refuse. I listened not out of a curiosity, but out

of warning: an assurance he wouldn’t fall, or hit his head
on something. I listened to ensure one of us lived.

There was no snow-slicked tundra here, no ship locked
in the embrace of ice. In fact, I sweated through my shirt,

the last, hot tongues of summer teasing along my neck.
My father kept the apartment chilled, a bottle of white wine

held at the closure. And when I cut his toenails, I did so
with the devotion of a child confronted with their father’s mortality

for the first time: fearful, a little nervous. I shouldn’t
have worried. The clippers sliced through the thickened edge

of the nail efficiently. Their sick noise sounded in the silence,
while I knelt at the foot of my creator. I could have spent my life stitching

what is precious together again: the line between my first initial
and the middle name of his other daughter, the one who died.

I could have spent my life chasing the ideal female:
her name was Rebecca. Her little fists opened and closed,

then opened again. Her lungs: little birds in flight.

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This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 8 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2025.

Angel

There he was: grief-eyed lightning
struck
                                             with tenderness.
                Coughing up hope
to make way                       for the water
                entering his lungs.

                                I knew that boy was an angel
because his rage was sung,
                                              not spoken.
His hands
                                that destroyed nothing
                  but themselves.

                  His skin already soaked through
with everything but light.
                  Because he looked into the fire
and saw only                        the light’s consequence.

Divine fury. Righteous blood
-letting.                  The earth cradles him
                                                                like a grenade.

Snowdrop.                            Rainfall.
                                He is every beautiful thing named
                at the moment of its dying.

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This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 8 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2025.

DEAR GHOSTS OF THE 1948 JEJU UPRISING,

I am spending the summer here on the island with my grandmother
where tobacco-chewing 아저씨 sell red bean popsicles
and melon ice cream beneath hagyul trees.
I wander the beaches beyond which pearl divers holding their breath
submerge in the Pacific, then sell or eat what they find
to keep their families alive.

When I grow tired of 오징어, abalone, and rice,
my grandmother finds a place that sells American food.
I gorge on pizza and plain hamburgers, tiny cans of Sprite
which Koreans always sip with a straw, but I
pour down my throat like an American.
From our room at the Hyatt, I drift to sleep each night
as my grandmother says her Christian prayers aloud
in the bed next to me, as the lily-scented warm wind
outside my open window perfumes my dreams
of silver boats floating near the horizon.

I know only a few phrases in Korean: that hurts / may I
please have strawberries / I don’t understand.
My grandmother knows only hello and goodbye, yes and no in English.
One day I teach her to say fish, but because in Korean there is no letter “f,”
it sounds like peesh. When I giggle at her she says it again
and we go on like that for a while, me trying to teach her,
and she saying pish, peesh, pish, both of us laughing
until our eyes brim with salt water.

Ghosts of Jeju: if you could speak and I could
understand you, what would you say?
Nearby, a guide leads tourists to Doteul Cave.
In 1948 you hid here for sixty days, decided you’d had enough of war,
mostly farmers caught between sides, determined


to no longer belong to anyone but each other.
Would you say hello, say it hurts, say pish
over and over until the boats cross the horizon, until I dream myself
into the cave where your moon-white bones stand together still,
in our still-divided country, roaring in every language?

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This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 8 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2025.

There are Monsters

I once killed several caterpillars
below a tree that was dripping with them

as though they were rain or sap,
and their falls were silent as a balloon.

Don’t ask me about their faces,
too small to know there are monsters

they have evolved to evade.
Really, the tree was dripping.

All I ever wanted was to marry the Titanic.
To break into gigantic pieces

so everyone would know
something happened here.

But instead I became a daughter left
by a mother who loved lighthouses,

those romantic things with bright lights
that show the ship the shore.

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This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 8 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2025.

Stories

A cicatrix of scar tissue, a necklace of missing lymph nodes,
bare back of a mad woman chanting by the river’s edge,
catwalking between dunes along a hem of shoreline,
divested of office clothes, gone the pencil skirt and
elegant silk blouse. Equally lost is the desire for tight
fabric, all synthetics—even sweat-wicking yoga pants,
guess-which-polymer bras—nothing that closes in, that
hugs my breasts, nothing with the word “wonder”
inscribed on the tag, nor with complicated instructions.
Jersey shirts, dresses, and tees or no clothes at all.
Knowledge arrives like seeds across the ocean. More luck
lands at my feet every year, or it dies. A woman is an ocean, a
mother before eggs are harvested, harboring sacs,
nesting thousands, which could become her mini-mes,
ova as portraits. We carry generations tucked inside the deep
prairie of our bodies—great-grandmother’s habit of
queefing during sex, her passion for homemade ravioli, her
reflexes—the knee that pulsed when sitting, eyes that
sang when speaking failed, when the language she adopted
tripped off her tongue. The stories are too many, too
unsung, too untold for the telling is hard, the telling is beyond our
vernacular, folded into an untapped, microscopic chorus. In the
womb that begins before the womb, women sustain
xeroxed generations, which become beings who work, who
yearn for freedom, for meaning, to end the cycle, the
zig-zag that keeps us coming back to life—or not at all.

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                                 How It Could Have
                                     Been Different

   “You  know what  I keep coming back to?”  Dr. B  said,  uncrossing his
legs  and  repositioning himself in his chair. His forehead  creased  with
the  intensity of  his  thought. “I  keep  coming  back to that pastor.  The
one your dad tried to talk to.”
   “Yeah,”  I said, hugging my arms close and folding a little at the  waist
into  my protective  posture. Lately, we’d been venturing into  the  vola-
tile territory of faith. The most difficult territory to navigate because  of
my general disillusionment. But even  when I determined to, I  couldn’t
fully  abandon  it. Despite  my  dismissal, I  felt  a  pull to  try to  resolve
things. The figuring out part was perilous therapy ground.
   Dr. B kept going. “I’d sort of like to punch that guy in the face.”
   He   feigned  shame  and  took  an exaggerated look around the  small
office  as  though  someone  else  might   have  overheard  him.  Talk  of
punching pastors was  not typically  understood as the “good  Christian
behavior”   we  had  both  been   taught  in  our  strikingly  similar  faith
backgrounds, but  he was not apologetic. His  late father  was a  Baptist
minister.  He  grew  up in  the  evangelical world—a  place you  have  to
have  lived  to  know.  In  our  second   session,  when  I’d  recognized  a
familiar  logo on  the coffee mug  he was drinking from, I’d  discovered
that we’d both graduated (eighteen years apart) from  Gordon  College,
a  non-denominational, Christian liberal arts school on  Massachusetts’
North Shore.
   I  also knew from small anecdotes he’d shared that faith had not been
an  effortless  path  for him  either. He’d  encountered  his own  periods

of  disillusionment,  so an ease had  emerged in our work together  over
the  past  three years that made  it  okay  for us  to  say  what we  meant,
shocking  or not, appropriately  “Christian” or not. And  though he  was
using  the  bluntness of  this  statement  about  punching  the  pastor  to
allow  space for my anger,  an authentic part of him meant exactly what
he said.
   I smiled even though I felt like crying. Gratitude draped over me, and
I loosened my arms. “I know the feeling,” I said.
   We’d  been   moving   cautiously   into  conversations  about  how   the
Christian,  particularly   evangelical,  response   to  AIDS  early  on—the
intolerance, the  bigotry,  the  turning  of  backs,  the  hateful  messages
from  powerful evangelical  leaders—was  such  a  critical factor in  how
isolated  I felt when my  dad  was sick. A factor that  tied  to my  doubts
about whether there was a place for God in my life now.
   The  story of  this pastor was  one  I’d told Dr. B a long time  ago,  and
I  was moved, not simply because  he would contemplate punching this
guy on  my behalf, but because he’d earmarked this event as significant
enough to hold in his memory. It was a  story that I only learned  about
long  after the  fact  when  I’d sat  alone  reading the  manuscript of  my
parents’  book in my basement  room in Halifax.  A story that  I  wished
I  had  the power to rewrite  because  its outcome solidified a  trajectory
that, twenty-five years later, landed me on this couch.
   Here are the facts as I know them from three stark paragraphs in The
Book:  On a Sunday  afternoon in  1987,  two  years after his  diagnosis,
Dad  was  home alone and  struggling  with  vivid thoughts  of  suicide.
He  called the   pastor of the large, downtown church we attended  and
asked  for an urgent  meeting. The  pastor   agreed, came to our  home,
and  my father disclosed to him the  secret of his HIV infection and  his
anguish. The  pastor offered a  short  prayer and then  made an  abrupt
exit,  leaving my father alone  without  counsel or  support.  The  pastor
later  called  my  mother and told  her if  she and  my father needed  his
help, he would  like them  to come to his office so he would not have  to
visit them in their home.
   They never heard from the man again.

                                                          — 
   My  father was a proud man. He was used to being the guy in  charge.
The  one  always  in control. Nothing  would  have  been riskier for  him
than  being in that  position  of  vulnerability that day  with  the  pastor.
So  exposed. When I try to imagine  the courage it took for him  to  pick
up  the telephone that  Sunday  afternoon, I feel a  clenching fist in  the
pit  of my stomach. And  when I think about that  moment of  rejection,
picture  that pastor turning away  from Dad’s obvious torment, a disap-
pointment bigger than any other threatens to strangle me.
   Because  that  was  the  one  shot. The  one  shot  to  prove that  Dad’s
fears of being ostracized by those around us—ostracized by those in the
Christian   community—were wrong.  The  one  shot   to  break  through
the loneliness of this terrible secret and get the support that he needed.
That we all needed.

                                                       — 
   The  good-girl  me wanted to give the pastor the benefit of the  doubt.
To  extend him some grace. Was  it  unfair for me to stack the  outcome
of  our story squarely on  one man’s shoulders? 1987 was  a  scary  time
when  it came  to  AIDS. I’d  lived  the history. No  one seemed to  know
the  right  way  to   respond. There  was  so  much  ignorance.  So  much
mystery  connected to this illness that took the lives of so many. Maybe
I could forgive him. I had been scared then too.
   A  few  years  earlier, after  recounting this story for  the  first  time  to
Dr. B, I’d gone home, sat down at my laptop, and typed the man’s name
into  the  Google  search  bar.  His  bio on  the  New  York  City  church’s
website  was  the  first thing  to pop  up. When I clicked  on the link, his 
face appeared at the top of my screen.It took me a moment to recognize
him: he was bald and sported a trendy goatee and dark rimmed glasses.
But  I knew his face and my stomach seized. I scrolled  through the  site
and  read about his work and  the impact he’d had on his  congregation.

I  read about his family. Those kids I used to babysit were married  now
with children of their own. He was somebody’s grandfather.
   So,  I wanted to excuse him. I wanted to believe that he simply  hadn’t
been  equipped with the proper tools for the unique nature of my  dad’s
situation. I wanted to chalk it up as one bad blip on the broader  screen
of  his  successful  ministry.  He  was  the  good  guy  in  so  many  other
people’s  stories.  I wanted  to stop thinking that  everything  he’d  done
since 1987 was negated because of one mishandled incident.
   But I couldn’t.
   I couldn’t because in the thirty years since he’d turned his back on my
dad,  on  my whole family,  he’d  never looked  back. Never  apologized.
Never  questioned  his  behavior  enough  to  clarify or  remedy  it.  Dad
died,  but the rest of  us didn’t. We were there  the  whole  time,  coping
with the grief, railing against the loss. And some of us still felt the  pain
and  confusion and  loneliness  of that  experience  as deeply as we  did
then. Maybe more so.

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                                        Epilogue

                                                             —   
No one had bothered to turn  on the  outside  lights,  and the  dim  glow
from the shaded  cottage windows  did  little  to  disperse  the  darkness
around  me  when  I stepped  out into the night.  The  air  was dewy and
warm  against  my  skin.  The  gravel  crunched under my flip flops as  I
followed  the   path  to our cottage. I  stopped halfway across  the  space
between  the two  buildings  and  tilted  my  head  back   to  look  at  the
stretch  of sky  overhead. Something  about  the  island  geography,  the
nearness  of  the  ocean,  made the sky feel bigger here. Stars punctured
the black, tiny pinpricks of light shaping into familiar constellations.
   “Here, I’ll help you trace it,” Dad’s  voice echoed  somewhere  deep  in
the  recesses  of my brain and a memory sharpened. We  were sprawled
side  by  side  on  a thick, shag carpet in the family room of our summer

cottage  in  New  Brunswick. The  lights  were  off so we could stare  out
at  the  night  sky  through  the panoramic window that took up most of
the  front  wall and showcased the view of the river. On this night when
I was  about  nine,  it  was so clear we could see satellites tracking paths
among  the  brilliant  sea  of  stars.  While Mom and David searched for
signs  of  the  anticipated  meteor  shower,  Michael and Mark had been
pointing  out  the  different  constellations, competing to see who could
spot them first.
   “I see Orion,” Mark declared with triumph.
   “I found that five minutes ago,” Michael said.
   I was still trying to locate the Big Dipper.
   Dad  closed  his  hand over mine and pointed  my  finger to a particu-
larly bright star. “That’s the North  Star,” he said. “Always  look for that
one  first.  It helps  you to clear the  clutter  of  all  the  other  ones.”  He
moved  my  finger in a straight line from that star to another bright one
a few inches below it. “Now this is the edge of the Big Dipper,” he said.
“It’s  made  up  of  these seven bright stars.” He  drew a shape  with  my
finger. “Think of a big soup ladle, or even the shape of a  wheelbarrow,”
he said.
   I  focused  my eyes on those stars as  he traced the  shape again.  And,
just  like   that, I  saw it. “There!”  I  cried, triumphant  satisfaction  and
wonder mingling in a single word.
   “There,”  Dad  said, and drew  my  finger back  up  to  the  North Star.
“Now,  see  if  you can  find  the Little Dipper too. The North  Star  is  at
the tip of its handle.”
   I found it right away. Dad released his grip on my hand,  and I  rested
my  head  against  his shoulder and stared up at  the Big Dipper and the
Little  Dipper,  tracing  their  lines with  my  finger over and over again.
The  two  constellations  stood out from all of the other stars. I felt  like
I’d been let in on an important secret.
   “From  now   on,   you’ll   always   know  how   to  find   them   without
anybody’s help,” Dad said.
   More  than  thirty  years later, the same starry canvas gazed down  on
me where I stood between the cottages and I couldn’t help feeling  that

infinite  space cluttered with so many of my  habitual  questions always
too  big for answers. Why didn’t the boys and Mom linger in their grief
the  way I did  when confronted with images of what  could  have been?
Why  weren’t  the words of regret and loss and longing I  so  wanted  to
speak  the same  words that  rested on  their  tongues? Why  were  they
so quick to shut  down moments  like  tonight  that opened up space  to
remember?  As  the disappointment of  yet  another  gathering of  unre-
alized  expectations  tried to take hold, a concession  funneled  into  my
mind.  I  couldn’t  know  what was inside of  them  any  more than  they
could  know  what  was  inside of me. A  fresh  question  surfaced.  Why
did  their  responses matter so much? And that night, for the first  time,
I considered a new answer.
   Maybe they didn’t.
   It  felt  like  opening  a  release  valve on  a  pressurized  tank.  All  the
pent-up  frustrations  leaking  out in one,  swift  whoosh,  leaving  room
for an emerging, gentler clarity.
   It didn’t matter whether my search was their  search.  What  mattered
was  that  my  search  was  leading   me  toward  something  that  I   was
starting  to recognize as important and  necessary even though  I  could
not yet see the constellation for the stars.
   I  could  not  yet see that reaching  back and  tracing  the  history  that
landed my family  where it did would be my path forward. That I would
eventually  choose to let go and leave behind some of the questions that
weren’t really mine to answer.

                                                         —   
   I  could not yet see  that at  the very  moment I’d be  ready  to  publish
this book, a new  pandemic would  rage  across the globe, impacting  us
all,  and  carrying  with  it  haunting  reverberations  of  the  early  AIDS
crisis. That twenty-five years  after my father’s death, his  story and  the
stories  of  countless other victims of HIV/AIDS  would hold lessons for
our present crisis and continue to resonate.
   But  that  August  night, I  couldn’t  see any  of  these  things.  What  I
could  see was the  North  Star, still  and sure at the  center of  the  sky.
A  fixed point.  A beacon. In various cultures across the world,  the  Big
Dipper  is  part of the cultural mythology. In Greek  stories,  it’s  known

as  the Great  Bear. In Ireland  and the  UK,  the  Plough.  In  Germany,
it’s  called the Great Cart, and in Italy, the Great Wagon.  However,  in
an  old  Arabic legend, the four stars that make up the asterism’s  bowl
symbolize  a coffin, and the three stars of the handle are the  mourners
who follow after the deceased.
   I  stretched  my  finger  and  followed  an  ascending  path  to the  star
representing the final mourner at the tip of the Big Dipper.
   “There,” I said softly and dropped my  hand to my side. The sound  of
my voice drifted on the air and trailed upward, expectant. Limitless.

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