
In this edition of Ms. Muse, four feminist poets write and talk about queerness, happiness, genderless sex and imagining change—personally and politically.
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.
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.