CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/7/2026

The reaching never ends in 'Love & Lightning'

Featured spreads are from Pride Month Staff Pick Love & Lightning: A Collection of Queer-Feminist Manifestos, co-published by Valiz and Girls Like Us magazine. “‘Manifesto’ is always, already slipping away from us,” editors Jessica Gysel and Sara Kaaman write in their Introduction; “morphing, changing, in never-ending transformation. A text is a portal to a specific time, place, and lived experience. Compressing wild writing and revolutions and dreams into neatly designed, typeset pages will always feel a little bit like violence. The violence of uniformity, the violence of anthologizing. But we do this work for the archives—for those who come after us, to find these words held together. The reaching never ends: reaching for a different world, reaching for peace, reaching for fair wages, reaching beyond capitalism, colonialism, extractivism. Reaching into the earth, for soil to kiss. Love is in the reaching. Dry tinder burns easily. What dries us up? Capitalism and all that—‘an utter bore.’ All that’s needed is a strike of lightning. A spark. Consider this book a spark. Use it to burn. Soft fires in your heart, large fires to make heat and change.”