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The Palace of Bones
Allison Eir Jenks
Ohio University Press, 2002

The Palace of Bones by Allison Eir Jenks is an often stark and startling vision of the way we live, the places we inhabit, and the relics we make to comfort ourselves.

Haunted by a quiet, unquenchable longing, Jenks expertly and calmly guides the reader through a vivid dreamscape in this first full-length collection of poems.

The Palace of Bones was selected by final judge and Pulitzer Prize winner Carolyn Kizer. At once dark in its vision and light in its tone, this remarkable book is its author’s self-confident invitation for us to join her in a world she knows intimately and has made almost familiar if not entirely safe.

The Palace of Bones is a stunning debut.

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Palace-Burner
The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt
Edited and with an Introduction by Paula Bernat Bennett
University of Illinois Press, 2001

The unique and powerful voice of an extraordinary nineteenth-century woman poet

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836-1919) now ranks as the strongest American woman poet of the nineteenth century after Emily Dickinson. Published heavily in all the period's most prestigious journals, Piatt was widely celebrated by her peers as a gifted stylist in the genteel tradition. This selected edition reveals Piatt's other side, a side that contemporary critics found more problematic: ironic, experimental, pushing the limits of Victorian language and the sentimental female persona.

Spanning more than half a century, this collection reveals the "borderland temper" of Piatt's mind and art. As an expatriate southerner, Piatt voices guilt at her own past as the daughter of slave-holders and raw anguish at the waste of war; as an eleven-year "exile" in Ireland, she expresses her dismay at the indifference of the wealthy to the daily suffering of the poor. Her poetry, whether speaking of children, motherhood, marriage, or illicit love affairs, uses conventional language and forms but in ways that greatly broadened the range of what women's poetry could say. Going beyond and even contradicting the genteel aesthetic, Piatt's poetry moves toward an innovative kind of dramatic realism built on dialogue, an approach more familiar to modern readers, acquainted with Faulknerian polyvocal texts, than to her contemporaries, who were as ill at ease with complexity as they were with irony. 

This astutely edited selection of Piatt's mature work--much of it never before collected--explains why her "deviant poetics" caused her peers such discomfort and why they offer such fertile ground for study today. Illustrated with engravings from Harper's Weekly and Harper's Bazaar, both periodicals in which Piatt's work appeared, Palace-Burner marks the reemergence of one of the most interesting writers in American literary history.

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Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut
Vickie Vértiz
University of Arizona Press, 2017
Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut uses both humor and sincerity to capture moments in time with a sense of compassion for the hard choices we must make to survive. Vértiz’s poetry shows how history, oppression, and resistance don’t just refer to big events or movements; they play out in our everyday lives, in the intimate spaces of family, sex, and neighborhood. Vértiz’s poems ask us to see Los Angeles—and all cities like it—as they have always been: an America of code-switching and reinvention, of lyric and fight.
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"Pamphilia to Amphilanthus" in Manuscript and Print
Lady Mary Wroth
Iter Press, 2017
Lady Mary Wroth’s private manuscript, printed here for the first time, shows her to be a great poet, more psychologically insightful, verbally sophisticated, and boldly original than scholars had realized. Her carefully curated and re-conceptualized printed collection also reveals her to be a remarkably self-reflexive and critically astute writer. When the manuscript and printed sequences are read together, as this edition encourages readers to do, Wroth’s poetry is seen clearly as innovative, erotic, and shrewdly multivalent.
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A Pan-American Life
Selected Poetry and Prose of Muna Lee
Muna Lee; Edited and with biography by Jonathan M. Cohen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
The extraordinary Muna Lee was a brilliant writer, lyric poet, translator, diplomat, feminist and rights activist, and, above all, a Pan-Americanist. During the twentieth century, she helped shape the literary and social landscapes of the Americas. This is the first biography of her remarkable life and a collection of her diverse writings, which  embody her vision of Pan America, an old concept that remains new and meaningful today.
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Paper Sons and Daughters
Growing up Chinese in South Africa
Ufrieda Ho
Ohio University Press, 2011
Ufrieda Ho’s compelling memoir describes with intimate detail what it was like to come of age in the marginalized Chinese community of Johannesburg during the apartheid era of the 1970s and 1980s. The Chinese were mostly ignored, as Ho describes it, relegated to certain neighborhoods and certain jobs, living in a kind of gray zone between the blacks and the whites. As long as they adhered to these rules, they were left alone. Ho describes the separate journeys her parents took before they knew one another, each leaving China and Hong Kong around the early 1960s, arriving in South Africa as illegal immigrants. Her father eventually became a so-called “fahfee man,” running a small-time numbers game in the black townships, one of the few opportunities available to him at that time. In loving detail, Ho describes her father’s work habits: the often mysterious selection of numbers at the kitchen table, the carefully-kept account ledgers, and especially the daily drives into the townships, where he conducted business on street corners from the seat of his car. Sometimes Ufrieda accompanied him on these township visits, offering her an illuminating perspective into a stratified society. Poignantly, it was on such a visit that her father—who is very much a central figure in Ho’s memoir—met with a tragic end. In many ways, life for the Chinese in South Africa was self-contained. Working hard, minding the rules, and avoiding confrontations, they were able to follow traditional Chinese ways. But for Ufrieda, who was born in South Africa, influences from the surrounding culture crept into her life, as did a political awakening. Paper Sons and Daughters is a wonderfully told family history that will resonate with anyone having an interest in the experiences of Chinese immigrants, or perhaps any immigrants, the world over.
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Paradise
Victoria Redel
Four Way Books, 2022

Rewriting Eden, Victoria Redel interrogates the idea of paradise within the historical context of borders, exile, and diaspora that brought us to the present global migration crisis. Drawing from a long family history of flight and refuge, the poems in Paradise interweave religion and myth, personal lore and nation-building, borders actual and imagined. They ask: What if what we fell from was never, actually, grace? What is a boundary, really? Redel navigates geopolitical perimeters while also questioning the border between the living and the dead and delineating the migrations aging women make in their bodies and lives. With stark lyricism and unflinching attention, Paradise considers how a legacy of trauma shapes imagination and asks readers to see the threads that tie contemporary catastrophes to the exigencies and flight paths that made us.

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Paradise
Victoria Redel
Four Way Books, 2022

Rewriting Eden, Victoria Redel interrogates the idea of paradise within the historical context of borders, exile, and diaspora that brought us to the present global migration crisis. Drawing from a long family history of flight and refuge, the poems in Paradise interweave religion and myth, personal lore and nation-building, borders actual and imagined. They ask: What if what we fell from was never, actually, grace? What is a boundary, really? Redel navigates geopolitical perimeters while also questioning the border between the living and the dead and delineating the migrations aging women make in their bodies and lives. With stark lyricism and unflinching attention, Paradise considers how a legacy of trauma shapes imagination and asks readers to see the threads that tie contemporary catastrophes to the exigencies and flight paths that made us.

[more]

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Parlor Radical
Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism
Jean Pfaelzer
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997
Rebecca Harding Davis was a prominent author of radical social fiction during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In stories that combine realism with sentimentalism, Davis confronted a wide range of contemporary American issues, giving voice to working women, prostitutes, wives seeking divorce, celibate utopians, and female authors. Davis broke down distinctions between the private and the public worlds, distinctions that trapped women in the ideology of domesticity.

By engaging current strategies in literary hermeneutics with a strong sense of historical radicalism in the Gilded Age, Jean Pfaelzer reads Davis through the public issues that she forcefully inscribed in her fiction. In this study, Davis's realistic narratives actively construct a coherent social work, not in a fictional vacuum but in direct engagement with the explosive movements of social change from the Civil War through the turn of the century.
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Partenia, A Pastoral Play
A Bilingual Edition
Barbara Torelli Benedetti
Iter Press, 2013
The Other Voice’s edition of Barbara Torelli’s pastoral drama Partenia (c. 1586) is a groundbreaking contribution to the study of early modern Italian literature and women’s writing. This is the first ever print edition of the earliest secular play by an Italian woman, acclaimed at the time of its composition—the drama theorist Angelo Ingegneri placed it on a par with Tasso’s Aminta and Guarini’s Pastor fido—but long forgotten, to the extent that it was believed lost until the early twentieth century, when the first manuscript of it surfaced in Cremona.
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Partisans
Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals
David Laskin
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Combining literary biography with astute reporting and moral insight, David Laskin shows how sex, politics, and art affected relationships among the Partisan Review writers: Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, Hannah Arendt, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, and Diana Trilling. It is the women who steal the show with their their groundbreaking work, their harrowing experiences of marriage, abuse, and betrayal, their passion for writing and disdain for feminism, their struggles and achievements.
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Paula Vogel
Joanna Mansbridge
University of Michigan Press, 2014
Paula Vogel’s plays, including the Pulitzer–prizewinning How I Learned to Drive, initiate a conversation with contemporary culture, staging vexed issues like domestic violence, pornography, and AIDS. She does not write "about" these concerns, but instead examines how they have become framed as “issues­”–as sensationalized topics–focusing on the histories and discourses that have defined them and the bodies that bear their meanings. Mobilizing campy humor, keen insight, and nonlinear structure, her plays defamiliarize the identities and issues that have been fixed as "just the way things are." Vogel crafts collage-like playworlds that are comprised of fragments of history and culture, and that are simultaneously inclusive and alienating, familiar and strange, funny and disturbing. At the center of these playworlds are female characters negotiating with the images and discourses that circumscribe their lives and bodies.

In this, the first book-length study of Vogel and her work, Joanna Mansbridge explores how Vogel’s plays speak back to the canon, responding to and rewriting works by William Shakespeare, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet, rearranging their plots, revising their conflicts, and recasting their dramatis personae. The book examines the theories shaping the playwright and her plays, the production and reception of her work, and the aesthetic structure of each play, grounding the work in cultural materialist, feminist and queer theory, and theater and performance studies scholarship.
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Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream
An African American Writer's (Re)Visionary Gospel of Success
Alisha Knight
University of Tennessee Press, 2012

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was perhaps the most prolific black female writer of her time. Between 1900 and 1904, writing mainly for Colored American Magazine, she published four novels, at least seven short stories, and numerous articles that often addressed the injustices and challenges facing African Americans in post–Civil War America. In Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream, Alisha Knight provides the first full-length critical analysis of Hopkins’s work.
    Scholars have frequently situated Hopkins within the domestic, sentimental tradition of nineteenth-century women's writing, with some critics observing that aspects of her writing, particularly its emphasis on the self-made man, seem out of place within the domestic tradition. Knight argues that Hopkins used this often-dismissed theme to critique American society's ingrained racism and sexism. In her “Famous Men” and “Famous Women” series for Colored American Magazine, she constructed her own version of the success narrative by offering models of African American self-made men and women. Meanwhile, in her fiction, she depicted heroes who fail to achieve success or must leave the United States to do so.
    Hopkins risked and eventually lost her position at Colored American Magazine by challenging black male leaders, liberal white philanthropists, and white racists—and by conceiving a revolutionary treatment of the American Dream that placed her far ahead of her time. Hopkins is finally getting her due, and this clear-eyed analysis of her work will be a revelation to literary scholars, historians of African American history, and students of women’s studies.

Alisha Knight is an associate professor of English and American Studies at Washington College. Her published articles include “Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard: Revisiting Pauline E. Hopkins, Booker T. Washington, and the Colored American Magazine,” which appeared in American Periodicals.

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Peach State
Poems
Adrienne Su
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
Finalist, 2022 Patterson Poetry Prize

Peach State has its origins in Atlanta, Georgia, the author’s hometown and an emblematic city of the New South, a name that reflects the American region’s invigoration in recent decades by immigration and a spirit of reinvention. Focused mainly on food and cooking, these poems explore the city’s transformation from the mid-twentieth century to today, as seen and shaped by Chinese Americans. The poems are set in restaurants, home kitchens, grocery stores, and the houses of friends and neighbors. Often employing forms—sonnet, villanelle, sestina, palindrome, ghazal, rhymed stanzas—they also mirror the constant negotiation with tradition that marks both immigrant and Southern experience.
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Perigee
Diane Kerr
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
In these visceral poems, Diane Kerr reckons with dark trauma. Retracing memories from girlhood that she once felt compelled to keep secret, perspectives shift as the lens of adulthood brings the past into sharp clarity.

Moments are revealed in layers; we join the poet as she rides through fields on horseback, watches a woman testify on television, and comes to terms with her experiences of sexual abuse. Vivid recollections of emotionally charged minutiae—broken-in cowboy boots, the second button on a blouse, a housecoat patterned with pink begonias—remind us how even the smallest details can be fraught with both nostalgia and pain. Each poem wields power, with resonating narratives of fear and survival reminding us that suffering has no statute of limitations.
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Piano in the Dark
Nancy Naomi Carlson
Seagull Books, 2023
Poetry from an especially deft magician of words.
 
This latest book of wonders from Nancy Naomi Carlson fixes upon one of the few defenses we have to confront the body’s betrayals—our words. Though in the end, even the world’s last word “forgets its name . . . has no word for this forgetting.” At once vulnerable and open, tempered and tempted equally by the erotic and the empathic, such dualities limn these affectingly beautiful and lyrical poems. Carlson’s lines, entreating as Scheherazade, “weave chords / into tales within tales, whirlpools within seas” to save her life. Indeed, music has no need for voice or harp, as “in anechoic chambers, you become / the only instrument of your worldly sounds,” echoing Mozart’s credo “that music lies / in the silence between notes.” In a world scarred by pandemics, wars, and violent tribalism, the givens are gone—“talismans we clung to, believing / we might be spared in some way / by marking our doors / with our own sacrificial blood.” In these unflinching free and formal verse poems, Carlson seduces us with the promise of the joy yet to be had, were we to look in the right places.
 
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Pinion
Monica Rico
Four Way Books, 2024
“I / step into the kitchen because I can / no longer smell the lilac / bush my father cut down,” Monica Rico writes in the opening poem of her astonishing debut collection. Deeply invested in unearthing women’s identity from a patriarchal family structure, these pages catalog life beside loss, the truth of cruelty accompanied by a defiant vitality. Here, where the declaration “I can” is modified to “I can / no longer,” Rico untangles the paradox of love, how a persistent absence keeps the missing object present, asserting itself through grief and memory; the scent of lilac lingers precisely because we cannot smell it anymore. The dual meaning of "pinion" scaffolds this collection, which considers Rico's family and their experiences in the context of her grandparents' immigration to the USA from México, American racial capitalism, and the mass migration catalyzed and necessitated by Western colonialism. “Pinion” in noun form refers to a bird's outer flight feathers; in verb form, it means to bind or sever this part of the wing to hinder flight. Bound up in this word, then, is a thing and its destruction — a possibility and a thwarted hope side by side. Rico creates her own motifs to write a representative genealogy, approaching her family as an ornithologist: across poems, her grandfather (who worked at General Motors) appears as an owl, her grandmother figures as a robin, and the American project shows up in the eagle's warped beak and surveilling eye. A field work of restoration, these poems compose a personal history and a deconstruction of global capitalism as articulated through an encyclopedia of birds. From the chaos of our flawed world, Rico salvages an enduring hope, reminding us that “a broken / song like an ugly duckling isn’t ugly / but unique, and stands out like the flightless / dodo who trusts because it is too awful not to.” 
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Pink Lady
Poems
Denise Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025
A new collection from the award winning poet Denise Duhamel
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Pink Pirates
Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright
Caren Irr
University of Iowa Press, 2010

Today, copyright is everywhere, surrounded by a thicket of no trespassing signs that mark creative work as private property. Caren Irr’s Pink Pirates asks how contemporary novelists—represented by Ursula Le Guin, Andrea Barrett, Kathy Acker, and Leslie Marmon Silko—have read those signs, arguing that for feminist writers in particular copyright often conjures up the persistent exclusion of women from ownership. Bringing together voices from law schools, courtrooms, and the writer's desk, Irr shows how some of the most inventive contemporary feminist novelists have reacted to this history. 

 Explaining the complex, three-century lineage of Anglo-American copyright law in clear, accessible terms and wrestling with some of copyright law's most deeply rooted assumptions, Irr sets the stage for a feminist reappraisal of the figure of the literary pirate in the late twentieth century—a figure outside the restrictive bounds of U.S. copyright statutes. 

 Going beyond her readings of contemporary women authors, Irr’s exhaustive history of how women have fared under intellectual property regimes speaks to broader political, social, and economic implications and engages digital-era excitement about the commons with the most utopian and materialist strains in feminist criticism.

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Pink Waves
Sawako Nakayasu
Omnidawn, 2021
A poem in conversation with literature and written during a durational performance.
 
Written in loose sonata form, Pink Waves is a poem of radiant elegy and quiet protest. Moving through the shifting surfaces of inarticulable loss, and along the edges of darkness and sadness, Pink Waves was completed in the presence of audience members over the course of a three-day durational performance. Sawako Nakayasu accrues lines written in conversation with Waveform by Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto, and micro-translations of syntax in the Black Dada Reader by Adam Pendleton, itself drawn from Ron Silliman’s Ketjak. Pink Waves holds an amalgamation of texts, constructing a shimmering haunting of tenderness, hunger, and detritus.
 
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Playing House in the American West
Western Women's Life Narratives, 1839–1987
Cathryn Halverson
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Examines an eclectic group of western women’s autobiographical texts—canonical and otherwise—Playing House in the American West argues for a distinct regional literary tradition characterized by strategic representations of unconventional domestic life  

The controlling metaphor Cathryn Halverson uses in her engrossing study is “playing house.”  From Caroline Kirkland and Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, western authors have persistently embraced wayward or eccentric housekeeping to prove a woman’s difference from western neighbors and eastern readers alike. 

The readings in Playing House investigate the surprising textual ends to which westerners turn the familiar terrain of the home: evaluating community; arguing for different conceptions of race and class; and perhaps most especially, resisting traditional gender roles.  Western women writers, Halverson argues, render the home as a stage for autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather than as a site of sacrifice and obligation.

The western women examined in Playing House in the American West are promoted and read as representatives of a region, as insiders offering views of distant and intriguing ways of life, even as they conceive of themselves as outsiders. By playing with domestic conventions, they recast the region they describe, portraying the West as a place that fosters female agency, individuality, and subjectivity.
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Plays in Time
The Beekeeper's Daughter, Prophecy, Another Life and Extreme Whether
Karen Malpede
Intellect Books, 2017
Plays in Time collects four plays by Karen Malpede set during influential events from the late twentieth century to the present: the Bosnian war and rape camps; the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Israel’s 2006 bombardment of Lebanon; 9/11 and the US torture program; and the heroism of climate scientists facing attack from well-funded climate change deniers. In each play in this anthology, nature, poetry, ritual, and empathy are presented in contrast to the abuse of persons and world. Despite their serious topics, the plays are full of humor and distinctively entertaining personalities.
 
Each play was developed by Theater Three Collaborative for production in New York and internationally in Italy, Australia, London, Berlin, and Paris.
 
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The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson
From the New Negro Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement
Edited and with an Introduction by Judith L. Stephens
University of Illinois Press, 2006

Recovering the stage work of one of America's finest black female writers

This volume collects twelve of Georgia Douglas Johnson's one-act plays, including two never-before-published scripts found in the Library of Congress.  As an integral part of Washington, D.C.'s, thriving turn-of-the-century literary scene, Johnson hosted regular meetings with Harlem Renaissance writers and other artists, including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, May Miller, and Jean Toomer, and was herself considered among the finest writers of the time.  Johnson also worked for U.S. government agencies and actively supported women's and minorities' rights.

As a leading authority on Johnson, Judith L. Stephens provides a brief overview of Johnson's career and significance as a playwright; sections on the creative environment in which she worked; her S Street Salon; "The Saturday Nighters," and its significance to the New Negro Theatre; selected photographs; and a discussion of Johnson's genres, themes, and artistic techniques.

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Poemas de amor / Love Poems
Idea Vilariño (translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval)
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Longlist, 2021 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

Eight years before Sylvia Plath published Ariel, the Uruguayan poet Idea Vilariño released Poemas del Amor, a collection of confessional, passionate poetry dedicated to the novelist Juan Carlos Onetti. Both of her own merit and as part of the Uruguayan writers group the Generation of ’45—which included Onetti, Mario Benedetti, Amanda Berenguer, and Ida Vitale—Vilariño is an essential South American poet, and part of a long tradition of Uruguayan women poets.

Vilariño and Onetti’s love affair is one of the most famous in South American literature. Poemas del Amor is an intense book, full of poems about sexuality and what it means to be a woman, and stands as a testament to both the necessity and the impossibility of love. This translation brings these highly personal poems to English speaking audiences for the first time side-by-side with the original Spanish language versions.

THE WITNESS
 
I don’t ask you for anything
don’t accept anything from you.
It’s enough that you are
in the world
that you know I am
in the world
that you might be
To me, you might be
witness judge and god.
If not
what is it for.
 
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Poems and Fancies with The Animal Parliament
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
Iter Press, 2018
Margaret Cavendish released her Poems and Fancies during a brief reprieve from exile, and at a time when international conversations on questions regarding science, mathematics, and metaphysics significantly advanced the state of knowledge across Britain and Europe despite war and political turmoil. This volume offers the first complete modernized version of the third edition of Cavendish’s book, including prefaces and dedications, all 274 poems on nature’s various avatars, interludes and masques, and the final prose parable, The Animal Parliament. Cavendish offers views on physics, chemistry, algebraic geometry, medicine, political philosophy, ethics, psychology, and animal intelligence, as she develops her own theory of vital matter within the scope of nature’s ordering principles.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. The Toronto Series: Volume 64
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The Poems and Letters of Tullia d'Aragona and Others
A Bilingual Edition
Tullia d'Aragona and Others, Edited by Julia L. Hairston, Translated by Julia L. Hairston
Iter Press, 2014

Hairston has constructed a full personal, cultural and literary biography for d’Aragona, using newly discovered letters, archival material of other kinds, and contemporary theory about gender in women’s writing. Footnotes establish the intricacy of Tullia’s intellectual networks and her courting of intellectuals in rhyme. Hairston includes poems written to d’Aragona, including Girolamo Muzio’s long pastoral, Tirrhenia. She addresses with tact the question of how sexual Tullia’s relationships were with her various interlocutors. At times, as she says, one just can’t know, but that the issue is much less important than the poems themselves. I agree wholeheartedly. This is the editor Tullia has been waiting for: an indefatigable researcher, a creative biographer, and a precise and appreciative literary critic.
—Ann Rosalind Jones
Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor of Comparative Literature, Smith College

The figure of Tullia d’Aragona has long fascinated readers as the prototype of the “honest courtesan”, a woman who successfully exploited her physical and intellectual charms to win the adoration and respect of the Italian cultural elite. With Julia Hairston’s richly annotated edition of her collected verse, the product of more than a decade of scholarship, d’Aragona finally comes into focus also as poet. She emerges in this volume as one of the most distinctive protagonists in a key transitional moment in Italian literary history, when the aristocratic tradition of Petrarchist lyric began to be reshaped and democratized by its encounter with print.
—Virginia Cox
Professor of Italian, New York University

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Poems and Meditations
Anne Bradstreet
Iter Press, 2019
This volume presents all the surviving writings of the poet Anne Bradstreet (ca. 1612–1672): the poems published during her lifetime in The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America; or, Several Poems (London, 1650), poems added to the posthumous edition of Bradstreet’s Several Poems (Boston, 1678), and the material in her hand and that of her son preserved in a manuscript volume known as the Andover manuscript. Extensive footnotes illuminate Bradstreet’s broad reading in the medical, scientific, and historical literature of her day, as well as her interest in recent and current English history and politics.
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Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda
Lady Hester Pulter
Iter Press, 2014
Scholars who study early modern women’s writing have been eager for a full-text edition of the works of Hester Pulter since her manuscript was discovered in the mid-1990s. Now that Alice Eardley has brought together all of Pulter’s writing—poetry, emblems, and a prose romance—in a modern-spelling edition, students and academics will be able to access a remarkable body of work. The introduction does a brilliant job of situating Pulter in various milieux (the Civil War, religion, science) and in assessing the genres in which she worked. Eardley’s edition is clear and comprehensive enough to be useful to a wide audience of non-specialists, but its learned glosses are also illuminating for more experienced readers of early modern texts.
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The Poems of Emily Dickinson
Including Variant Readings Critically Compared with All Known Manuscripts
Emily Dickinson
Harvard University Press

Interest in Emily Dickinson has grown throughout the years until, now, in this three-volume edition Thomas Johnson presents the entire body of poems she is known to have written, 1775 in all. Here are the familiar “I never saw a Moor” and “Because I could not stop for Death,” along with other less well-known poems, including forty-three never before published. Casual notes to friends and relatives which frequently accompany scraps of verse help to reveal the poet's enigmatic character. After keen analysis of the manuscripts, Johnson has arranged the poems in what is believed to be their chronological order, with variations and rejected versions of each poem following.

In his introduction, the editor discusses the stylistic and historical development of the poetic art of Emily Dickinson, and he considers the manuscripts and the history of the editing of the poems. A careful study of the poet's handwriting is illustrated with several facsimiles. The appendix contains valuable material on the recipients of the poems as well as a subject index and an index of first lines.

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Poems of the First Buddhist Women
A Translation of the Therigatha
Charles Hallisey
Harvard University Press, 2021

A stunning modern translation of a Buddhist classic that is also one of the oldest literary texts in the world written by women.

The Therīgāthā is one of the oldest surviving literatures by women, composed more than two millennia ago and originally collected as part of the Pali canon of Buddhist scripture. These poems were written by some of the first Buddhist women—therīs—honored for their religious achievements. Through imaginative verses about truth and freedom, the women recount their lives before ordination and their joy at attaining liberation from samsara. Poems of the First Buddhist Women offers startling insights into the experiences of women in ancient times that continue to resonate with modern readers. With a spare and elegant style, this powerful translation introduces us to a classic of world literature.

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The Poetics of Difference
Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Winner of the Modern Language Association (MLA)’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize

From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into the unexplored spaces of black women’s queer creative theorizing to learn its languages and read the textures of its forms. Moving beyond fixed notions, Sullivan points to a space of queer imagination where black women invent new languages, spaces, and genres to speak the many names of difference. Black women’s literary cultures have long theorized the complexities surrounding nation and class, the indeterminacy of gender and race, and the multiple meanings of sexuality. Yet their ideas and work remain obscure in the face of indifference from Western scholarship.

Innovative and timely, The Poetics of Difference illuminates understudied queer contours of black women’s writing.

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A Poetics of Resistance
Women Writing in El Salvador, South Africa, and the United States
Mary DeShazer
University of Michigan Press, 1994
The recent critical works that look at literature as a weapon of resistance have frequently neglected the genre of poetry, particularly the poetry of Third World women writers. A Poetics of Resistance is the first book-length examination of poetry written by woman of El Salvador, South Africa, and the United States and the ways it bears witness to political struggle and produces new kinds of knowledge.
 
Engaging the works of critics such as Chandra Mohanty, Barbara Harlow, Claribel Alegria, Albie Sachs, and Audre Lorde, among others, Mary DeShazer reconceptualizes traditional notions of resistance and literature and the relationship between them. She argues that women’s voices have been underrepresented in previous analyses of Third World resistance poetry, and that when examined collectively, their work reveals overtly gendered concerns that distinguish it from that of their male counterparts.
 
DeShazer defines resistance as an active quest for justice and a means of collective empowerment. She looks at the diasporic consciousness of exiled and dislocated women, examines the tensions between claims of identity and claims of difference, and explores the ways in which gender and struggle connect women across nationalities and historical imperatives. Her analysis of Salvadoran and South African women’s poetry reveal the ways in which poetic conventions can be seen as “political declarations of privilege,” casting a new light on women’s resistance poetry in the United States.
 
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The Poetry of Louise Glück
A Thematic Introduction
Daniel Morris
University of Missouri Press, 2006
A dominant figure in American poetry for more than thirty-five years, Louise Glück has been the recipient of virtually every major poetry award. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020 and was named U.S. poet laureate for 2003–2004. In a full-length study of her work, Daniel Morris explores how this prolific poet utilizes masks of characters from history, the Bible, and even fairy tales.
            Morris treats Glück’s persistent themes—desire, hunger, trauma, survival—through close reading of her major book-length sequences from the 1990s: Ararat, Meadowlands, and The Wild Iris. An additional chapter devoted to The House on Marshland (1975) shows how its revision of Romanticism and nature poetry anticipated these later works. Seeing Glück’s poems as complex analyses of the authorial self via sustained central metaphors, Morris reads her poetry against a narrative pattern that shifts from the tones of anger, despair, and resentment found in her early Firstborn to the resignation of Ararat—and proceeds in her latest volumes, including Vita Nova and Averno, toward an ambivalent embrace of embodied life.
By showing how Glück’s poems may be read as a form of commentary on the meanings of great literature and myth, Morris emphasizes her irreverent attitude toward the canons through which she both expresses herself and deflects her autobiographical impulse. By discussing her sense of self, of Judaism, and of the poetic tradition, he explores her position as a mystic poet with an ambivalent relationship to religious discourse verging on Gnosticism, with tendencies toward the ancient rabbinic midrash tradition of reading scripture. He particularly shows how her creative reading of past poets expresses her vision of Judaism as a way of thinking about canonical texts.
            The Poetry of Louise Glück is a quintessential study of how poems may be read as a form of commentary on the meanings of great literature and myth. It clearly demonstrates that, through this lens of commentary, one can grasp more firmly the very idea of poetry itself that Glück has spent her career both defining and extending.
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A Poet’s Prose
Selected Writings Of Louise Bogan
Louise Bogan
Ohio University Press, 2005

Although best known as a master of the formal lyric poem, Louise Bogan (1897–1970) also published fiction and what would now be called lyrical essays. A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan showcases her devotion to compression, eloquence, and sharp truths.

Louise Bogan was poetry reviewer for the New Yorker for thirty-eight years, and her criticism was remarkable for its range and effect. Bogan was responsible for the revival of interest in Henry James and was one of the first American critics to notice and review W. H. Auden. She remained intellectually and emotionally responsive to writers as different from one another as Caitlin Thomas, Dorothy Richardson, W. B. Yeats, André Gide, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Bogan’s short stories appeared regularly in magazines during the 1930s, penetrating the social habits of the city as well as the loneliness there. The autobiographical element in her fiction and journals, never entirely confessional, spurred some of her finest writing. The distinguished poet and critic Mary Kinzie provides in A Poet’s Prose a selection of Bogan's best criticism, prose meditations, letters, journal entries, autobiographical essays, and published and unpublished fiction.

Louise Bogan won the Bollingen Prize in 1954 for her collected poems. She is the subject of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Elizabeth Frank, Louise Bogan: A Portrait.

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Points of the Compass
Stories
Sahar Tawfiq
University of Arkansas Press, 1995
This collection of short stories, recipient of a 1994 University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation, presents one of Egypt’s most innovative contemporary fiction writers. In her first collection published in English, Sahar Tawfiq explores the consciousnesses of young women alienated from their surroundings in today’s rapidly changing Egyptian society. In questioning the place of long-powerful myths and beliefs, she is in the forefront of writers examining the legacy of the Pharaohs as it permeates current Egyptian identities and practices, especially in the countryside. Her characters are shaped by journeys through modern social and economic trials and the ageless troubles of the human spirit and heart.
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Political Affairs of the Heart
Female Travel Writers, the Sentimental Travelogue, and Revolution, 1775-1800
Linda Van Netten Blimke
Bucknell University Press, 2022
Richly researched and engagingly written, Political Affairs of the Heart traces the emergence of female sentimental travel writing in late eighteenth-century Britain, and posits its centrality to women’s engagement with national and gender politics. This study examines four travel narratives written by women between 1774 and 1795, convincingly arguing that they effectively deploy the discourse of sensibility to engage with debates around Britain’s national identity during the French and American Revolutions. Van Netten Blimke contends that Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768)—which first introduced sentimental discourse to the travelogue—facilitated women’s gradual inclusion into this previously male-dominated genre, effectively paving the way for women to influence the country’s sociopolitical transformation. These four previously understudied works successfully combine eyewitness authority with the language of sensibility to mount impassioned interventions in their nation’s perception and practice of revolutionary politics, at a time when its national identity was most in flux.
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PORTAL
Tracy Fuad
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A poetry collection exploring inheritance and reproduction through the lenses of parenthood, etymology, postcoloniality, and climate anxiety.
 
Tracy Fuad’s second collection of poems, PORTAL, probes the fraught experience of bringing a new life into a world that is both lush and filled with gloom. A baby is born in a brutalist building; the planet shrinks under the new logic of contagion; roses washed up from a shipwreck centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape. PORTAL documents a life that is mediated, even at its most intimate moments, by flattening interfaces of technology and in which language—and even intelligence—is no longer produced only by humans. The voices here are stalked by eco-grief and loneliness, but they also brim with song and ecstasy, reveling in the strangeness of contemporary life while grieving losses that cannot be restored. Through Fuad’s frank, honest poetry, PORTAL vibrates with pleasure and dread.
 
Peeling back the surfaces of words to reveal their etymologies, Fuad embraces playfulness through her formal range, engaging styles from the tersely lineated to the essayistic as she intertwines topics of replication, reproduction, technology, language, history, and biology.
 
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Portraits of the Queen Mother
Polemics, Panegyrics, Letters
Catherine de Médicis and Others
Iter Press, 2014
Catherine de Médicis was portrayed in her day as foreign usurper, loving queen and queen mother, patron of the arts, and Machiavellian murderer of Protestants. Leah L. Chang and Katherine Kong assemble a diverse array of scathing polemic and lofty praise, diplomatic reports, and Catherine’s own letters, which together show how one extraordinary woman’s rule intersected with early modern conceptions of gender, maternity, and power.
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Power in the Blood
A Family Narrative
Linda Tate
Ohio University Press, 2009

Power in the Blood: A Family Narrative traces Linda Tate’s journey to rediscover the Cherokee-Appalachian branch of her family and provides an unflinching examination of the poverty, discrimination, and family violence that marked their lives. In her search for the truth of her own past, Tate scoured archives, libraries, and courthouses throughout Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Illinois, and Missouri, visited numerous cemeteries, and combed through census records, marriage records, court cases, local histories, old maps, and photographs. As she began to locate distant relatives — fifth, sixth, seventh cousins, all descended from her great-greatgrandmother Louisiana — they gathered in kitchens and living rooms, held family reunions, and swapped stories. A past that had long been buried slowly came to light as family members shared the pieces of the family’s tale that had been passed along to them.

Power in the Blood is a dramatic family history that reads like a novel, as Tate’s compelling narrative reveals one mystery after another. Innovative and groundbreaking in its approach to research and storytelling, Power in the Blood shows that exploring a family story can enhance understanding of history, life, and culture and that honest examination of the past can lead to healing and liberation in the present.

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Praying Naked
Katie Condon
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
Through language both reverent and reckless, Katie Condon’s debut collection renders the body a hymn. Praying Naked is Eden in the midst of the fall, the meat of the apple sweet as sex. In this collection, God is a hopeless and dangerous flirt, mothers die and are resurrected, and disappointing lovers run like hell for the margins. With effortless swagger and confessional candor, Condon lays bare the thrill of lust and its subsequent shame. In poems brimming with “the desire / to be desired” by men, by God, by lovers’ other women, by oneself, she renders a world in which wildflowers are coated in ash and dark bedrooms flicker with the blue light of longing. The speaker implores like an undressed wound: “is it wrong to feel a hurt kind of beautiful?” Ecstatic and incisive, Praying Naked is a daring sexual and spiritual reckoning by a breathtaking new poet.
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Prelude
Poems
Brynne Rebele-Henry
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Finalist, 2023 Lammy Award in Lesbian Poetry
Prelude delineates the gay female experience through a poetic reconstruction of the girlhood of Catherine of Siena, a Catholic saint who lived in 1300s Italy and disobeyed her parents by refusing marriage to devote her life to God. Through a historical lens, Brynne Rebele-Henry examines the erasure of gay women’s lives and offers a perspective of medieval queer girlhood while considering themes such as violence, desire, and the lesbian body.

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Prolific Ground
Landscape and British Women's Writing, 1690-1790
Nicolle Jordan
Bucknell University Press
Land ownership—and engagement with land more generally—constituted a crucial dimension of female independence in eighteenth-century Britain. Because political citizenship was restricted to male property owners, women could not wield political power in the way propertied men did. Given its foundational socio-political function, land necessarily generated copious writing that vested it with considerable aesthetic and economic value. This book, then, situates these issues in relation to the historical transformation of landscape under emergent capitalism. The women writers featured herein—including Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Sarah Scott, and Elizabeth Montagu—participated in this transformation by celebrating female estate stewardship and evaluating the estate stewardship of men. By asserting their authority in such matters, these writers acquired a degree of independence and self-determination that otherwise proved elusive.
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Protecting the Spanish Woman
Gender Identity and Empowerment in María de Zayas's Works
Xabier Granja Ibarreche
University of Nevada Press, 2023
An important contribution to the study of women writers.

María de Zayas is unique in the seventeenth century as the only Spanish woman to write a collection of exemplary novels whose quality is often compared to Miguel de Cervantes’ masterful works. Her two main collections of short stories, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and Desengaños amorosos, encompass a social critique based on literary fiction that exposes flaws in the idealized archetypes of masculine identity in early modern Spain. Zayas’s stories redefine women’s patriarchal disadvantage as a tool to expose the ways in which early modern Spanish women could be empowered to counteract men’s discursive and political authority, which they use to unfairly maintain their own social privilege.
 
Xabier Granja Ibarreche explores how Zayas defies Spanish hegemony by manipulating and transforming the ideals of courtly masculinity that had been popularized by conduct manuals and the traits they specified for appropriate noble comportment. In doing so, Zayas elaborates a nonofficial discourse throughout plots that subvert patriarchal hierarchies: she rearticulates the existing ideological order to empower women who are no longer willing to remain silent and oppressed by masculine domination after centuries of failing to attain a sufficiently self-sufficient political position to ascend in the social hierarchy. By inverting the male gaze that assumes masculinity as a preeminent identity, Zayas subverts the patriarchal subject/masculine, object/feminine order and destabilizes manly superiority as a basic universal reality, thereby empowering and unshackling Spanish women to liberate Iberian culture from the repressive and pernicious future she forebodes.
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Protection Spell
Poems
Jennifer Givhan
University of Arkansas Press, 2017

Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins

“A poet of great heart and brave directness.”

—Billy Collins

In Protection Spell Jennifer Givhan explores the guilt, sadness, and freedom of relationships: the sticky love that keeps us hanging on for no reason other than love, the inky place that asks us to continue revising and reimagining, tying ourselves to this life and to each other despite the pain (or perhaps because of it). These poems reassemble safe spaces from the fissures cleaving the speaker’s own biracial home and act as witnesses speaking to the racial iniquity of our broader social landscape as well as to the precarious standpoint of a mother-woman of color whose body lies vulnerable to trauma and abuse. From insistent moments of bravery, a collection of poems arises that asks the impossible, like the childhood chant that palliates suffering by demanding nothing less than magical healing: sana sana colita de rana, si no sanas hoy, sanas mañana (the frog who loses his tail is commanded to grow another). In the end, Givhan’s verse offers a place where healing may begin.

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Poems
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024


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