Women have been responding to sexual harassment for generations. Poet Genevieve Taggard, born in 1894 in Washington state, was one of them; in “The Quiet Woman,” she captures fury and anger “like a surly tiger” of a woman fending off an unwanted advance.
Author: Julie Enszer
Julie R. Enszer is a scholar and poet. She's currently the editor of Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal, and a regular book reviewer for the Lambda Book Report and Calyx. Julie's research has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern Cultures, Journal of Lesbian Studies, American Periodicals, WSQ, Frontiers and other journals; she is the author of the poetry collections Avowed, Lilith’s Demons, Sisterhood and Handmade Love and the editor of The Complete Works of Pat Parker and Milk & Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry.
Five Feminist Poems for National Poetry Month: “The Washerwoman” by Mary Weston Fordham
Mary Western Fordham portrays the body and the mind of a working woman in “The Washerwoman.”
Five Feminist Poems for National Poetry Month: “To Sylvia” by Amy Levy
“To Sylvia” is from Amy Levy’s 1884 collection A Minor Poet and Other Verse. Reaching across the centuries to read the poem is an encounter with passion and desire.
On Editing Sister Love
I heard tell of the correspondence between Pat Parker and Audre Lorde before I sat down to have brunch with Martha Dunham.
Talkin’ About a Revolution: JP Howard on Raising Her Fist—and Queer Women’s Voices
“It is crucial, in fact necessary, to have literary spaces like Sinister Wisdom to raise our voices, lift our symbolic fists and say ‘We are here! We are not going anywhere. We refuse to be silenced.'”
Unearthing Histories of Love, Exile and Perseverance
Philosophically provocative, historically rich and interesting, The Weight of Ink is the perfect summer novel—balancing richly drawn characters with a driving, compelling plot.
Five Feminist Poems for National Poetry Month: 5. “MO[DERN] [FRAME]”
Visual art is often an inspiration for poetry; poems based on visual art are called ‘ekphrastic poems.’ In “MO[DERN] [FRAME]” by Dawn Lundy Martin, Martin writes responses to an image by Carrie Mae Weems, an American artist who, over the past 25 years, has created “a complex body of art that has at various times […]
Five Feminist Poems for National Poetry Month: “4. From ‘Fleet of Nouns'”
What makes poetry musical? What makes poetry pleasing to the ear? Poets use a variety of tools to achieve the musicality of poetry. In this selection from a long poem by Sina Queyras, she uses anaphora, the repetition of the first words of a line, to build both musicality and a strong, supple power. Queyras […]
Five Feminist Poems for National Poetry Month: 3. “Invisibility Terror: a prose poem”
Feminist poets often take material for their poems from media headlines. Feminist poets often respond to and rewrite the news of the day in their poems. In “Invisibility Terror: a prose poem,” Cheryl Clarke examines the world post-9/11, making linkages between “Arab and Muslim people” and her own experiences with police officers 35 years ago […]
Five Feminist Poems for National Poetry Month: 2. “Rose and Snow Tell the Field Their Troubles”
In our second poem for this year’s National Poetry Month, poet Jenny Factor voices two familiar female protagonists, Rose-Red and Snow White. “Rose and Snow Tell the Field their Troubles” is a persona poem: The poet uses the voice of another character—here, the mythical characters from the Grimm fairy tales—to narrate a story. Giving new […]