As a systems change consultant, Shah has asked tough questions about domestic violence against women—and the relationships between structural, state, community and interpersonal violence—and then provided transformative research and strategies. Shah’s poetry asks hard questions, too.
Author: Chivas Sandage
Chivas Sandage is a digital columnist at Ms. and the author of Hidden Drive, a finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Awards in poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in Ms., The Rumpus, Salmagundi, Southern Humanities Review and Texas Observer, among others. The Massachusetts Cultural Council awarded Sandage a 2020 artist grant for her work on a nonfiction book about the double shooting of a lesbian teenage couple in Texas. Tweet her @ChivasSandage.
We Heart: Robin Ritz’s Feminist Anthem for the #MeToo Era
Robin Ritz’s song and video celebrate the divine feminine—in the women in our lives, in our archetypes and in ourselves.
Ms. Muse: On Political Poetry in the Trump Era—and a Call for Poems of Resistance
Please spread the word to feminist poets: If you’re writing about what you’re witnessing, what you’re living and what haunts you, we invite you to send your work to Ms. Muse for consideration.
Ms. Muse: Feminist Love Poems
In this edition of Ms. Muse, four feminist poets write and talk about queerness, happiness, genderless sex and imagining change—personally and politically.
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and author and VIDA co-founder Amy King opens up about learning to speak up and step up—and shares three previously unpublished poems with Ms.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.