Poetry

Writers across the globe speak out against sexual assault and abuse in this powerful new poetry anthology, edited by Sue Goyette

These collected poems from writers across the globe declare one common theme: resistance. By exploring sexual assault and violence in their work, each writer resists the patriarchal systems of power that continue to support a misogynist justice system that supports abusers. In doing so, they reclaim their power and their voice.

Created as a response to the Jian Ghomeshi case, writers including Joan Crate, Ashley-Elizabeth Best, and Beth Goobie are, as editor Sue Goyette explains, a “multitude, resisting.” The collection could not be more timely. The work adds a new layer to the ever-growing #MeToo movement.

Resistance underscores the validity of all women’s experiences, and the importance of dignifying such experiences in voice, however that may sound. Because once survivors speak out and disrupt their pain, there is no telling what else they can do.

Without Asking marks Jane Ransom’s debut as a book author, initially placing her within the poetic tradition of narrative Confessionalism. But one can already sense here the ambivalence that would lead both to a break from narrative—in her second poetry book, Scene of the
Crime—and her subsequent return to narrative in Bye-Bye, her first novel. This is a writer whose epistemological inquiry continuously turns both inward and outward, from linear to non-linear and back again, in an unrelenting quest for Truth.

Adele Slaughter’s first book of poems, What the Body Remembers, was published by Story Line Press in 1994. It is an autobiographical collection of glimpses into a childhood fraught with familial violence, alcoholism, and trauma, and the life that has been led in its wake; the failure of a marriage and the experiences that forever mold us as human beings. Through all the abuse and suffering these poems portray, however, the driving theme behind What the Body Remembers never falters: the reader is left with an inspiring picture of courage, perseverance, femininity, and the survival of the truest self. The subject of the work remains always the poet, the speaker, even as great attention is drawn to the circumstance surrounding her, providing an impactful example of how our greatest pains may leave us changed, but not defined, and never defeated. Pat Monaghan called the book “a stunning debut volume.”

Scene of the Crime exposes the poet’s inner criminality, where matricide and mother tongue engage in diabolic discourse. Confessing her outlaw sexuality, Ransom grapples with feminist theory and disembowels postmodern philosophy. Delighting in the multiplicity of self, language and desire, Ransom fires puns dead-aimed to riddle any interpretive reduction.

Excontemporary, a collection of poems by Beth Baruch Joselow, was published by Story Line Press in 1993. Jousting with form and language, the book combines image and idea in a painterly style. It contains poetry of sharp observation, coalescing gracefully into a thoughtful meditation on the inner life and the everyday. Mark Wallace, winner of the Gertrude Stein Prize in poetry, was among many that met Excontemporary with high praise: “Joselow’s poems discover, and uncover, keen truths that always surprise and unsettle and make us think again about things we believed we understood.”

Breath in Every Room intertwines parents and children with encounters in the natural world. Ranging from birds in the forest to a boy’s captured frogs, from rattlesnakes in the prairie to a bat fallen from the sky. The book weaves in and out of myth and dream.

Sharon Hashimoto explores themes of what is heard and misinterpreted, what is left unexplained, and what is passed down in The Crane Wife. In these pieces, the Sansei poet leafs through old photographs—one of which is of a newlywed couple with the groom’s image cut away. Here is the rediscovered piece of barbed wire from outside the Heart Mountain concentration camp. That wire, a lei, and a car trip to an empty lot are all bits of evidence. Her questions address grandparents, mother and father, siblings, and the next generation. Hashimoto also reinvents Japanese folk tales and explores the different voices of the members of a downed JAL jet. Her poems travel in new directions in an attempt to fill in the gaps.

The poems in Lisa C. Krueger’s Talisman interrogate the everyday expression of complex human emotions. In psychological portraits stunning in their precision, Krueger brings her observational powers to bear on the domestic and its darknesses—childbirth, play, sex, and family picnics, as well as abuse, disability, adultery, and mental illness. We see how intimacy is laced with uncertainty, how the bonds between us can be a form of bondage. Life’s long arc is considered, from the early developmental stages of attachment and individuation to the existential dramas of purpose and meaning in middle and old age. What emerges is a study in the mystery of survival, in how we move beyond the broken places in ourselves. These poems magnify small, everyday redemptions as signs—talismans—of human potential, and ask us to think about our choices, to use language as a force to press against truth.

Diamond Sharp’s Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where her speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in the hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free? 

Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks appear throughout, counseling the speaker as she navigates her own depression and exploratory questions about the “Other Side,” as do Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and other Black women who have been murdered by police violence. 

Sharp’s poetry is self-assured, playful, and imaginative, reminiscent of Langston Hughes with its precision and brevity. The book explores purgatorial, in-between spaces that the speaker occupies, as she struggles to find a place, a time, where she can live safely and freely. With her skillful use of repetition, particularly with her series of concrete poems, lines and voices echo across the book so the reader, too, feels suspended within Sharp’s lyric moments. Super Sad Black Girl is a compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.

Crossfire collects Staceyann Chin's empowering, feminist-LGBTQ-Caribbean, activist-driven poetry for the first time in a single book. According to The New York Times, Chin is “sassy, rageful and sometimes softly self-mocking.” The Advocate says that her poems, “combine hilarious one-liners with a refusal to conform” and note “Chin is out to confront more than just the straight world.”

At last recovered in this enriching annotated edition, this important but neglected work of American modernism offers a unique poetic encounter with the Jewish communities in New York’s Lower East Side.

Long forgotten on account of her gender and left-wing politics, Lola Ridge is finally being rediscovered and read alongside such celebrated contemporaries as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore—all of whom knew her and admired her work. In her time Ridge was considered one of America’s leading poets, but after her death in 1941 she and her work effectively disappeared for the next seventy-five years. Her book The Ghetto and Other Poems, is a key work of American modernism, yet it has long, and unjustly, been neglected. When it was first published in 1918—in an abbreviated version in The New Republic, then in full by B. W. Huebsch five months later—The Ghetto and Other Poems was a literary sensation. The poet Alfred Kreymbourg, in a Poetry Magazine review, praised “The Ghetto” for its “sheer passion, deadly accuracy of versatile images, beauty, richness, and incisiveness of epithet, unfolding of adventures, portraiture of emotion and thought, pageantry of pushcarts—the whole lifting, falling, stumbling, mounting to a broad, symphonic rhythm.” Louis Untermeyer, writing in The New York Evening Post, found “The Ghetto” “at once personal in its piercing sympathy and epical in its sweep. It is studded with images that are surprising and yet never strained or irrelevant; it glows with a color that is barbaric, exotic, and as local as Grand Street.”

The long title poem is a detailed and sympathetic account of life in the Jewish Ghetto of New York’s Lower East Side, with particular emphasis on the struggles and resilience of women. The subsequent section, “Manhattan Lights,” delves further into city life and immigrant experience, illuminating life in the Bowery. Other poems stem from Ridge’s lifelong support of the American labor movement, and from her own experience as an immigrant. This critical edition seeks to recover the attention The Ghetto, and Other Poems, and in particular the title poem, lost after Ridge’s death. The poems in the volume are as aesthetically strong as they are historically revealing. Their language combines strength and directness with startling metaphors, and their form embraces both panoramic sweep and lyrical intensity.

Expertly edited and annotated by Lawrence Kramer, this first modern edition to reproduce the full 1918 publication of The Ghetto and Other Stories offers all the background and context needed for a rich, informed reading of Lola Ridge’s masterpiece.

Late in the Day, Ursula K. Le Guin’s newest collection of poems, seeks meaning in an ever-connected world. In part evocative of Neruda’s Odes to Common Things and Mary Oliver’s poetic guides to the natural world, Le Guin gives voice to objects that may not speak a human language but communicate with us nevertheless through and about the seasonal rhythms of the earth, the minute and the vast, the ordinary and the mythological.

As Le Guin herself states, “science explicates, poetry implicates.” Accordingly, this immersive, tender collection implicates us (in the best sense) in a subjectivity of everyday objects and occurrences. Deceptively simple in form, the poems stand as an invitation both to dive deep and to step outside of ourselves and our common narratives. As readers, we emerge refreshed, having peered underneath cultural constructs toward the necessarily mystical and elemental, no matter how late in the day.

The poems are bookended with two short essays, “Deep in Admiration” and “Form, Free Verse, Free Form: Some Thoughts.”

In 2014, the National Book Foundation awarded Le Guin the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a lifetime achievement award. Her celebrated acceptance speech, which criticized Amazon as a “profiteer” and praised her fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, is included in Late in the Day as a postscript.