More Than A Magazine, A Movement
In 2020, Headmistress Press proudly announced the inaugural Sappho’s Prize in Poetry, awarded annually for one full-length poetry collection by a lesbian. To celebrate and promote this prize, poet and advocate Mary Meriam created a series of short monthly book reviews or interviews.
How does a living lesbian dress? How do we make conventional, traditional garments into our own looks? How do we send signals to other lesbians?
Caroline Earleywine, author of Lesbian Fashion Struggles and Mary Meriam, author of My Girl’s Green Jacket, sewed a cento with excerpts from their books, interwoven with excerpts from other poets.
“I try to imagine being with Charlotte Mew on March 24, 1928, the day she killed herself. Let me befriend her. Let me do and say things to ease her pain and save her.
“I’m a lesbian poet from the year 2020, Charlotte, who adores your poems, how they transform your torment into art.
“If I couldn’t save Mew on that day in 1928, perhaps I could save her poems.”
Mary Meriam—founding editor of Headmistress Press, one of the few presses in the United States specializing in lesbian poetry— interviews t’ai freedom ford about her fantastic new collection, “& more black.”
“As a Black, queer, masculine presenting woman, my writing is informed by these identities and how someone like me negotiates the mainstream/dominant American culture that consistently seeks to marginalize my voice and the voices of those who look, act and love like me.”
Coming out doesn’t make you at home in the world; nor, certainly, does sex. You need bonds beyond sex: a community, a culture, a shared set of obsessions. “Love on the March,” Alex Ross, The New Yorker 11/12/12 When I was a young lesbian in rural New Jersey in the ‘70s, I was completely lost […]
Do we read poems searching for answers? Do we write poems searching for answers? In the case of Naomi Replansky, yes and yes.
Vi Khi Nao is a prolific, prize-winning author working in poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration.We talked about her two “sapphic” books—The Vanishing Point of Desire and Swans in Half-Mourning—and, knowing she’d give me brilliant answers, I also asked her two questions almost impossible to answer.