Jenny Hamilton reviews a thoughtfully assembled and beautifully packaged set of stories, poems, and essays.
By Jenny Hamilton
Reactor Mag
October 14th, 2026
To be “widely anthologized” is a blessing and a curse: a mark that the author’s writing has the power to resonate with a vast array of editors and outlets, but also a near-assurance that some of what’s written will be lost to the next year’s anthology, to digital decay and magazine closures. Sheree Renée Thomas is widely anthologized, and for excellent reason, so it’s a particular treat to get a new collection of her work. The Tongue I Dream In brings together an assortment of poems, stories, and nonfiction, thoughtfully organized and curated. Readers who aren’t familiar with Thomas’ work may pick and choose what appeals to them, but longtime fans will want to burn straight through it.
Thomas’s love for Black art and Black excellence is palpable. Throughout the collection, she engages deeply with the art that goes into mediums other than writing (sculpture, poetry, dance, music, and even—to my delight—archive-keeping). “Conjuring Legacies,” an essay on Betye Saar and her daughters, puts the work of two generations of artists into conversation with each other, beautifully highlighting both shared themes and points of departure. The poems “A Strange Brutal Grace” and “Ring Shout on Saturn” speak to the enduring traditions of dance and faith among an exiled Black population aboard a generation ship.
Alongside that love, though, is a recurring theme of white appropriation of Black art and Black artists. Set in the same world as the two poems I mentioned above, “Jigganaut” tells the reader more about the nuts and bolts of the exiled generation ship. Our young protagonist, Nene, and her mother are minstrel performers aboard the generation ship, performing faux-Blackness for a white, upper-class audience. “Director say we can’t make white folks feel bad,” Nene reports, in a grim echo of legislation like Florida’s so-called “Stop WOKE Act.” The audience wants the trappings of Blackness, but they don’t care to be bothered with actual Black people. As Nene’s mother shrewdly tells her, “They want everything but the burden.” In the story that follows, “The Dragon Can’t Dance,” narrator Sanaa grapples with the events that have condemned her to spend her life and her dancing talents in a motion-capture suit that gives her choreography to a white performer (who, in a detail I enjoyed, goes by Isis).
Thomas also explores the porous boundaries between self and world. The poem “Rafters Hold” imbues a house with all the grief and rage of the history of Black oppression in this country; the phrase “Negro sorrow load bearing” went straight through me. In “River, Clap Your Hands”—a story I struggled to get through because I do not enjoy reliving the Katrina days—a mother grapples with her own otherness, the loss of a child, and the ways she belongs to the river that nearly killed her. Similarly, “Thirteen Year Long Song” sees a stubborn older man trying to make the decision to stay or go when his land—and the very air he breathes—has been poisoned by a nearby plant pumping out toxic substances. Through all of it, Thomas also honors endurance, recognizing that “the body keeps its own defiant cosmology” (from “A Strange Brutal Grace”).
If you’ve followed Thomas for a while, you know that her stories have a cosmology of their own, a Sheree Renée Thomas Cinematic Universe of sorts, and it’s fun to watch for the Easter eggs as you move through this collection. In an included interview with Nisi Shawl, Thomas highlights other stories and poems in her oeuvre that connect with the ones included here, which makes for a fun bonus reading list, if you’re so inclined. Thomas describes her work as “a continuous, evolving exploration of core themes across this shared realm […] inviting readers to discover its hidden connections and echoes.”
Thomas does invite readers to continue exploring, not just her own work but the deeper themes that underlie it. Her work asks readers to pay attention to the silences and lacunae, to listen closely for what’s not being said, to find the parallels between her work and the history she evokes. Like so much of Thomas’s work, the pieces in The Tongue I Dream In reward rereading, and there’s always more to discover.
Before I go, a word about PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series: There’s no better way to get to know some of the past and present lights of genre fiction. As is the case with The Tongue I Dream In, these collections are thoughtfully assembled and beautifully packaged, and they preserve in book form the more ephemeral—but no less important—forms of writing (poems, speeches, columns, etc.) from some of the best and most interesting writers out there. If you’re new to this series or this press, it’s worth your time to stop by their website and check out what they have to offer. This is not a paid advertisement; I just get emotional about small presses.
