In this edition of Ms. Muse, four feminist poets write and talk about queerness, happiness, genderless sex and imagining change—personally and politically.
Author: Chivas Sandage
Chivas Sandage is a digital columnist at Ms., winner of the 2021 Claire Keyes Poetry Award, and author of Hidden Drive, a finalist for the Foreword Book of the Year Award in poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Texas Observer, The Rumpus, Salmagundi, Southern Humanities Review, and the print version of Ms. Magazine, among others. Her debut nonfiction book is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press. Ms. Muse, her column, features contemporary feminist poets and essays on the intersection of poetry, politics, and our lives. Follow her on Twitter: @ChivasSandage.
Ms. Muse: What Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie’s Womanist Poems Tell Us About Love, Language and Race in America
“I don’t think I can isolate what I need as a writer from what I need as a Black woman, mother, wife—which is to live… And to know that my children have a future. And to know that my husband will not be hunted down.”
Ms. Muse: Patricia Spears Jones Fights Patriarchy and Racism with Feminist Poetry
“If the idea of the human is to be truly re-made, then women will do the making.” In this installment of Ms. Muse, acclaimed poet Patricia Spears Jones opens up about growing up in the segregated South, the literary world’s ageism and Eve’s resistance—and shares three new poems.
Ms. Muse: Amy King on the Power of Stories and the Weight of the Current Political Moment
For this installment of Ms. Muse, award-winning poet and author and VIDA co-founder Amy King opens up about learning to speak up and step up—and shares three previously unpublished poems with Ms. readers.
Ms. Muse: Mary Oliver’s Escape
The fact that this master poet, in the last decade of her life, felt inspired by other women writers to be “braver”—and worked to write those new poems—suggests that Mary Oliver finally exited the building that had once sucked all the air out of her body, and escaped that “broken house” of her childhood once and for all.
Ms. Muse: Liliya Yamkina’s Love Song
She longs for the snowy tundra, folk tales around the bonfire, her magic being needed. Isolated, she feels forgotten. But in her apartment, she keeps a notebook in a closet, and in that notebook, she writes love songs—love songs for the tundra.
Ms. Muse: What Happens When You Give a Girl a Pen
This is what can happen when you ask a girl to tell a story.
Ms. Muse: Christine Sloan Stoddard on the Urgency of Making Feminist Art After Kavanaugh
In this month’s edition of Ms. Muse, the prolific writer and visual artist shares new work from a forthcoming book and talks about the challenges of her childhood, the dissolving wall between literature and the art world and the urgency of creating after Kavanaugh.
Ms. Muse: Jessica Helen Lopez on Writing like a Xingona, Poetry as Medicine and the True Honey of Freedom
In this month’s installment, Jessica Helen Lopez—two-time Women of the World City of Albuquerque Champion and former Albuquerque Poet Laureate Emeritus and Poet-In-Residence for the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History—shares a new poem and talks to Ms. about jumping out of the shower to write, reclamation and thriving between languages.
Ms. Muse: Anastacia-Reneé on Poems Living in the Body, What Women Writers Need and Raising a Fist
In this edition of Ms. Muse, Seattle’s Civic Poet shares two new poems and demands space for women writers to thrive.