front cover of Daguerreotypes and Other Essays
Daguerreotypes and Other Essays
Isak Dinesen
University of Chicago Press, 1979
"Isak Dinesen . . . had an original approach to life that permeated all her work. She loved storytelling, with the result that most of her essays are quasi-narratives, which proceed not from major to minor premise but from one anecdote to another as the way of making concrete whatever idea she is considering. Her work is a delight and at times a marvel."—The New Yorker

"Through these daguerreotypes we begin to understand other periods, the renunciations of World War I, the purpose of houses and mansions, of ritual ceremonials, such as tatooing. We are given a fresh and vivid view of the women's movement . . . which urges that what our 'small society' needs beyond human beings who have demonstrated what they can do, is people who are. 'Indeed, our own time,' she wrote in 1953, 'can be said to need a revision from doing to being.' She demonstrated it in her own work and craft, with courage and with dignity. This collection is as real as a gallery of old daguerreotypes, moving and unfaded. The work, as Hannah Arendt says, of a wise woman."—Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

"These essays . . . have the flavor of good conversation: humorous, easy, personal but not oppressive, the distillation of reading, thought, and experience. Their subjects are of surprisingly current interest. We need make no concessions to the past, need not set our watches back to 'historical.' Isak Dinesen was not a faddish thinker. . . . 'In history it is always the human element that has a chance for eternal life,' Dinesen remarks, and she gives these essays their chance."—Penelope Mesic, Chicago
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Danzirly
Gloria Muñoz
University of Arizona Press, 2021
Danzirly is a striking bilingual poetry collection that fiercely examines the nuances of the American Dream for Latinx people in the United States. With a backdrop of stringent immigration policies, the #MeToo movement, and the increasingly tangible threat of climate change, this collection considers multigenerational Latinx identities in a rapidly changing country and world. Through the author’s Colombian American lens, the poems explore the intersections of culture, gender, history, and intergenerational grief.

Danzirly does not shy away from confronting traditional gender roles, religion, and anxieties surrounding climate change and the digital age. Gloria Muñoz addresses Latinx stereotypes and powerfully dismantles them in poetic form, juxtaposing the promised wonders of a life in America with the harsh realities that immigrants face as they build their lives and raise their families here. Winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, this collection of poems is an unforgettable reckoning of the grief and beauty that pulses through twenty-first-century America.
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Dark Smiles
Race and Desire in George Eliot
Alicia Carroll
Ohio University Press, 2002

Although George Eliot has long been described as “the novelist of the Midlands,” she often brought the outer reaches of the empire home in her work. Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot studies Eliot’s problematic, career-long interest in representing racial and ethnic Otherness.

Placing Eliot’s diverse and wide-ranging treatment of Otherness in its contemporary context, Alicia Carroll argues that Eliot both engages and resists traditional racial and ethnic representations of Otherness. Carroll finds that Eliot, like other women writers of her time, often appropriates narratives of Otherness to explore issues silenced in mainstream Victorian culture, particularly the problem of the desirous woman. But if Otherness in Eliot’s century was usually gendered as woman and constructed as the object of white male desire, Eliot often seeks to subvert that vision. Professor Carroll demonstrates Eliot’s tendency to “exoticize” images of girlhood, vocation, and maternity in order to critique and explore gendered subjectivities. Indeed, the disruptive presence of a racial or ethnic outsider often fractures Eliot’s narratives of community, creating a powerful critique of home culture.

The consistent reliance of Eliot’s work upon racial and ethnic Otherness as a mode of cultural critique is explored here for the first time in its entirety.

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Darling Nova
Melissa Cundieff
Autumn House Press, 2018
This collection is musical, haunting, and simmering with life. Cundieff’s poems deal with loss and change through images that are startling in their originality. These poems will stay with you; they will remind you what poems can do.
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The Daughter of Man
L. J. Sysko
University of Arkansas Press, 2023

"This whip-smart collection is a playful celebration of feminine power.”
Publisher’s Weekly

"What a beautiful book.”
—Ross Gay

"With the verve of Alice Fulton and the panache of Gerald Stern, Sysko keens into the canon, a welcome voice. Sing, indeed, heavenly muse.”
—Alan Michael Parker

Finalist for the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Selected by Patricia Smith

The Daughter of Man follows its unorthodox heroine as she transforms from maiden to warrior—then to queen, maven, and crone—against the backdrop of suburban America from the 1980s to today. In this bold reframing of the hero’s journey, L. J. Sysko serves up biting social commentary and humorous, unsparing self-critique while enlisting an eccentric cast that includes Betsy Ross as sex worker, Dolly Parton as raptor, and a bemused MILF who exchanges glances with a young man at a gas station. Sysko’s revisions of René Magritte’s modernist icon The Son of Man and the paintings of baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi, whose extraordinary talent was nearly eclipsed after she took her rapist to trial, loom large in this multifaceted portrait of womanhood. With uncommon force, The Daughter of Man confronts misogyny and violence, even as it bursts with nostalgia, lust, and poignant humor.

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Daughters of Harriet
Cynthia Parker-Ohene
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Finalist, 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
Finalist, 2022 Foreword INDIES for Poetry
Finalist, 2022 Golden Poppy Award for Poetry
Finalist, 2022 San Francisco/Nomadic Literary Award for Poetry


Drawing inspiration from the life of Harriet Tubman, Cynthia Parker-Ohene’s poetic narratives follow a historical arc of consciousness of Black folks: mislaid in potters’ fields and catalogued with other misbegotten souls, now unsettled as the unknown Black denominator. Who loved them? Who turned them away? Who dismembered their souls? In death, they are the institutionalized marked Black bodies assigned to parcels, scourged beneath plastic sheets identified as a number among Harriets as black, marked bodies. These poems speak to how the warehousing of enslaved and somewhat free beings belies their humanity through past performances in reformatories, workhouses, and hospitals for the negro insane. To whom did their Black lives belong? How are Black grrls socialized within the family to be out in the world? What is the beingness of Black women? How have the Harriets—the descended daughters of Harriet Tubman—confronted issues of caste and multiple oppressions? These poems give voice to the unspeakable, the unreachable, the multiple Black selves waiting to become.
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Days of Our Lives
Joan Aleshire
Four Way Books, 2019
Day of Our Lives is equal parts social history and memoir documenting the unraveling of a marriage against the backdrop of the shifting social mores of 1960s and ’70s America. Joan Aleshire’s speaker, a young wife, enters marriage gratefully, even eagerly, believing it to be “a long table / with friends crowding in, red wine / in tumblers.” Motherhood follows, but so do infidelities and reconciliation and ultimately divorce. With each hard knock, the speaker sheds a little more of her innocence as she gains awareness of her power as both a woman and a writer: “Coming home / late from a festival for women / where I’d said all the things / the audience liked, I slipped / into bed so flush with triumph / my husband recoiled from the heat.”
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Debate of the Romance of the Rose
Christine de Pizan
University of Chicago Press, 2010

In 1401, Christine de Pizan (1365–1430?), one of the most renowned and prolific woman writers of the Middle Ages, wrote a letter to the provost of Lille criticizing the highly popular and widely read Romance of the Rose for its blatant and unwarranted misogynistic depictions of women. The debate that ensued, over not only the merits of the treatise but also of the place of women in society, started Europe on the long path to gender parity. Pizan’s criticism sparked a continent-wide discussion of issues that is still alive today in disputes about art and morality, especially the civic responsibility of a writer or artist for the works he or she produces.


In Debate of the “Romance of the Rose,” David Hult collects, along with the debate documents themselves, letters, sermons, and excerpts from other works of Pizan, including one from City of Ladies—her major defense of women and their rights—that give context to this debate. Here, Pizan’s supporters and detractors are heard alongside her own formidable, protofeminist voice.  The resulting volume affords a rare look at the way people read and thought about literature in the period immediately preceding the era of print.

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Debts & Lessons
Lynn Xu
Omnidawn, 2013
The poems in Lynn Xu’s striking debut collection, Debts & Lessons, travel under the power of history’s illusory engine and echo its ululations of love, violence, and lament. Named after the first part of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, this book also finds its way across oceans and between languages, as the poet looks to the dead for guidance amid the abstractions of contemporary life. Xu pays her phantoms (and her readers) with the dream-currency of hallucinatory songs, which balance her finely-tuned ear against a world of awakenings.
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Denise Levertov
A Poet's Life
Dana Greene
University of Illinois Press, 2014

Kenneth Rexroth called Denise Levertov (1923–1997) "the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, . . . and the most moving." Author of twenty-four volumes of poetry, four books of essays, and several translations, Levertov became a lauded and honored poet. Born in England, she published her first book of poems at age twenty-three, but it was not until she married and came to the United States in 1948 that she found her poetic voice, helped by the likes of William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley. Shortly before her death in 1997, the woman who claimed no country as home was nominated to be America's poet laureate.

Levertov was the quintessential romantic. She wanted to live vividly, intensely, passionately, and on a grand scale. She wanted the persistence of Cézanne and the depth and generosity of Rilke. Once she acclimated herself to America, the dreamy lyric poetry of her early years gave way to the joy and wonder of ordinary life. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, her poems began to engage the issues of her times. Vehement and strident, her poetry of protest was both acclaimed and criticized. The end of both the Vietnam War and her marriage left her mentally fatigued and emotionally fragile, but gradually, over the span of a decade, she emerged with new energy. The crystalline and luminous poetry of her last years stands as final witness to a lifetime of searching for the mystery embedded in life itself. Through all the vagaries of life and art, her response was that of a "primary wonder."

In this illuminating biography, Dana Greene examines Levertov's interviews, essays, and self-revelatory poetry to discern the conflict and torment she both endured and created in her attempts to deal with her own psyche, her relationships with family, friends, lovers, colleagues, and the times in which she lived. Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life is the first complete biography of Levertov, a woman who claimed she did not want a biography, insisting that it was her work that she hoped would endure. And yet she confessed that her poetry in its various forms--lyric, political, natural, and religious--derived from her life experience. Although a substantial body of criticism has established Levertov as a major poet of the later twentieth century, this volume represents the first attempt to set her poetry within the framework of her often tumultuous life.

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Desiring Voices
Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism
Mary B. Moore
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her Sonnets from the Portuguese.Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism proposes that we attend to the ways that women poets from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries have both echoed and transformed the literary and erotic conventions that strongly influenced their fates as women, wives, and lovers.

Mary B. Moore analyzes and provides context for love sonnet sequences by Italian, French, English, and American women poets in the light of current knowledge concerning attitudes towards women at the time they wrote. Through close readings of the poems combined with theory and criticism about constructs of women, historical events, and biographical contexts, Moore reveals patterns of revision among women poets that shed further light on the poets themselves, on Petrarchism as a convention, and on ideas about women. She focuses on Petrarchan sonnet sequences by women because the poems serve both as works of art and as documents that illuminate the range and limitations of female roles as erotic subjects (agents of speech, action, knowledge, and desire) as well as their more usual roles as erotic objects.

Combining theory with close reading, Moore enhances the value of many generally neglected poems by women. After a thorough discussion of the Petrarchan sonnet tradition, she analyzes the work of Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labé, Lady Mary Wroth, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

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Deuda Natal
Mara Pastor, Translated by María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong
University of Arizona Press, 2021
Deuda Natal finds the beauty within vulnerability and the dignity amidst precariousness. As one of the most prominent voices in Puerto Rican poetry, Mara Pastor uses the poems in this new bilingual collection to highlight the way that fundamental forms of caring for life—and for language—can create a space of poetic decolonization. The poems in Deuda Natal propose new ways of understanding as they traverse a thematic landscape of women’s labor, the figure of the nomad and immigrant, and the return from economic exile to confront the catastrophic confluence of disaster and disaster capitalism.

The poems in Deuda Natal reckon with the stark environmental degradation in Puerto Rico and the larger impacts of global climate change as they navigate our changing world through a feminist lens. Pastor’s work asserts a feminist objection to our society’s obsession with production and the accumulation of wealth, offering readers an opportunity for collective vulnerability within these pages. For this remarkable work, Pastor has found unique allies in María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong, the translators of Deuda Natal. Winner of the 2020 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets, this collection showcases masterfully crafted and translated poems that are politically urgent and emotionally striking.
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The Devil's Workshop
Poems
Demetria Martínez
University of Arizona Press, 2002
"I can no more describe love," writes Demetria Martínez, "than mystics can light."

Don't believe it for a minute. In this collection of fifty-three poems, the author of the award-winning novel Mother Tongue explores the themes that have long characterized her writing: the creative and destructive powers of romantic love, the failure of political systems, the spiritual life, and the need to forgive oneself in order to move on with the work of transformation, both social and personal. Through poems that confront mortality even as they demand social justice, Martínez writes of surviving in a culture where traditional values often get lost in the complexities of everyday life. Of nurturing relationships with nieces, nephews, and parents while pondering questions of life and death, love and loss. Of caring for one's own body when "each cough is an underground nuclear explosion, / Unraveling your body’s hard-won peace accord." Martínez cauterizes old wounds inflicted by various agents: death, political repression, betrayal, and of course failed romance: "Don’t bother, I did it / First. Broke my own / Damn heart." Here are "kernels of loneliness too stubborn to grind / Down to blue meal," and the struggle for a renewed sense of self as middle age approaches:

At this age you touch what little sanctity you can muster.
The yearning burns to do more, to do more by hand.
To thread your very life through a needle's eye.


Martínez serves up a heady blend of political and sensual imagery. Her keen observations and compassionate voice lead the reader on a journey of self-exploration, of coping with life's mundanities as well as its heartaches: "I could use a loving word, / A loaf of bread, a rose, / Help with the laundry." Through her unquenchable passion for life, Demetria Martínez leaves the devil’s workshop and brings us closer to an understanding of what is real.
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The Devonshire Manuscript
A Women's Book of Courtly Poetry
Lady Margaret Douglas and Others
Iter Press, 2012
This is an essential volume, and there’s no scholar better equipped to edit it than Elizabeth Heale, whose expertise on early women’s writing in manuscript is unsurpassed. The Devonshire Manuscript is a vital source of Tudor literary history, illustrating the circulation of lyrics by Tudor poets such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, and offering evidence of collaborative forms of production and circulation that challenge prior assumptions about early forms of authorship, readership, and literary culture more broadly. Yet despite its importance, the Devonshire Manuscript has been all but inaccessible until now. With its extensive notes, thoughtful introduction, and carefully edited text, Heale’s edition will be a valuable reference work for scholars as well as an important textbook for students encountering the Devonshire Manuscript for the first time.
—Jennifer Summit
Professor of English, Stanford University
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Dido's Daughters
Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France
Margaret W. Ferguson
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and the 2003 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.

Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in Dido's Daughters, this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing.

Fegurson's aim in this long-awaited work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Dido—builder of an empire that threatened to rival Rome—Ferguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary, and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.
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Dirt and Desire
Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990
Patricia Yaeger
University of Chicago Press, 2000
The story of southern writing—the Dixie Limited, if you will—runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture.

For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a southern fascination with dirt—who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it.

Yaeger's brilliant, theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies.

The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.
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Disarming the Nation
Women's Writing and the American Civil War
Elizabeth Young
University of Chicago Press, 1999
In a study that will radically shift our understanding of Civil War literature, Elizabeth Young shows that American women writers have been profoundly influenced by the Civil War and that, in turn, their works have contributed powerfully to conceptions of the war and its aftermath. Offering fascinating reassessments of works by white writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Mitchell and African-American writers including Elizabeth Keckley, Frances Harper, and Margaret Walker, Young also highlights crucial but lesser-known texts such as the memoirs of women who masqueraded as soldiers. In each case she explores the interdependence of gender with issues of race, sexuality, region, and nation.

Combining literary analysis, cultural history, and feminist theory, Disarming the Nation argues that the Civil War functioned in women's writings to connect female bodies with the body politic. Women writers used the idea of "civil war" as a metaphor to represent struggles between and within women—including struggles against the cultural prescriptions of "civility." At the same time, these writers also reimagined the nation itself, foregrounding women in their visions of America at war and in peace. In a substantial afterword, Young shows how contemporary black and white women—including those who crossdress in Civil War reenactments—continue to reshape the meanings of the war in ways startlingly similar to their nineteenth-century counterparts.

Learned, witty, and accessible, Disarming the Nation provides fresh and compelling perspectives on the Civil War, women's writing, and the many unresolved "civil wars" within American culture today.
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The Disobedient Writer
Women and Narrative Tradition
By Nancy A. Walker
University of Texas Press, 1995

For centuries, women who aspired to write had to enter a largely male literary tradition that offered few, if any, literary forms in which to express their perspectives on lived experience. Since the nineteenth century, however, women writers and readers have been producing "disobedient" counter-narratives that, while clearly making reference to the original texts, overturn their basic assumptions.

This book looks at both canonical and non-canonical works, over a variety of fiction and nonfiction genres, that offer counter-readings of familiar Western narratives. Nancy Walker begins by probing women's revisions of two narrative traditions pervasive in Western culture: the biblical story of Adam and Eve, and the traditional fairy tales that have served as paradigms of women's behavior and expectations. She goes on to examine the works of a wide range of writers, from contemporaries Marilynne Robinson, Ursula Le Guin, Anne Sexton, Fay Weldon, Angela Carter, and Margaret Atwood to precursors Caroline Kirkland, Fanny Fern, Mary De Morgan, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Edith Nesbit, and Evelyn Sharp.

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The Disordered Alphabet
Cintia Santana
Four Way Books
Cintia Santana’s virtuoso debut collection, The Disordered Alphabet, reckons with the emotional anarchy of our lives, baring the difficulty of wrestling experience into language. She surveys a cosmic crossroads, “the sluices of heaven wording as we [stand] in that great rushing wind within, yet without name, turning.” These poems pay homage to inherited forms while fashioning their own shapes — Santana writes in alliterative verse, in footnotes, in epistles to consonants and vowels, in ekphrasis, in thrall. Ranging from A to Z in style, subject, and mood, Santana’s poetic encyclopedia chronicles life’s ubiquitous elegies alongside the world’s innumerable wonders — true to jumbled experience, they arrive in no particular order, or in the particular order of all the time and all at once. If “let there be” enabled light, it released every other sublime liquid, for then also “there was lie. // Lapse. And lake. Luck and leap. Little by little. Letter by letter. And it was late. / And there was bloom.”
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Dogged
Stacy Gnall
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022
Located somewhere between fiction and reality, the animals of Dogged exist as both “creatures children see in their fevers” and “your one / good dream / in the night.” Inhabiting a space apart from time and narrative, the space of the ever-elusive now, these haunting poems probe animal consciousness and desire, as “howls float / like crocuses— / violet / and half open / to the unknown.”

Looking to a wide range of high and low visual media, from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and Animal Planet’s Fatal Attractions to Peter Paul Rubens’s painting of Hercules’s dog discovering Tyrian purple, Stacy Gnall ponders human-animal connections and divisions, exploring those moments when human voices blend with “silent” beasts to exceed the limits of language. In Dogged, animals emerge as the highest aspiration of poetry.
 
Around the bend it was reckoned
we would never grow old        
because there were no words for it.
I placed my arms soft
around the neck of a fawn
and she felt no alarm. Speech
is where we went wrong.
(From “The Wood in Which Things Have No Name”)
 
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Doris Lessing
Interrogating the Times
Debrah Raschke, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, and Sandra Singer
The Ohio State University Press, 2010
Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Timeswrestles with the ghosts that continue to haunt our most pressing twenty-first-century concerns: how to reconceive imprisoning conceptions of sexuality and gender, how to define terrorism, how to locate the personal, and how to write on race and colonialism in an ever-slippery postmodern world. This collection of essays clearly establishes Lessing’s importance as a unique and necessary voice in contemporary literature and life.
In tracing the evolution in Lessing’s representations of controversial subjects, this volume shows how new cultural and political contexts demand new solutions. Focusing on Lessing’s experiments with genre and on the ramifications of narrative itself, the collection asks readers to reformulate some of their most taken-for-granted assumptions about the contemporary world and their relation to it.
Contributors to Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times assess Lessing’s vision of the past and its relevance for the future by revisiting texts from the beginning of her career onward while at the same time probing previous interpretations of these works. These reassessments reveal Lessing’s continued role as a gadfly who, in disrupting rigid constructions of right and wrong and of good and evil, forces her readers to move beyond “you are damned, we are saved” narratives. As rationales such as these continue to permeate global venues, Lessing’s oeuvre becomes increasingly relevant.
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Doris Lessing
The Alchemy of Survival
Carey Kaplan
Ohio University Press, 1988

Long neglected by the academic world because of her rejection of belletristic values and resistance to convenient literary taxonomy, Doris Lessing has nonetheless built an international following of serious, dedicated readers. Acknowledging the difficulties posed by the multiple dimensions of Lessing’s work, Kaplan and Rose have gathered eleven essays that address her artistic, philosophical, political, and psychological complexity, and so provide a welcome introduction to the extraordinary depth and diversity of this important contemporary novelist.

Lessing has been described as an “alchemical” writer, in that her work is directed toward changing people’s lives and perceptions rather than simply recording experience. Accordingly, the contributors examine her various postures and tactics for the purpose of discovering how the alchemical elements inform her various personae. Frederick C. Stern discusses Lessing’s commitment to radical humanist thought, while Carey Kaplan examines how Lessing’s imperialist past has shaped her futuristic fiction. Elizabeth Abel offers a feminist interpretation of the pattern of brother-sister incest in Lessing’s work, showing how Lessing has established Antigone as a female alternative to the Oedipal myth of male incest. Particularly insightful is Eve Bertelsen’s report of her interview with Lessing, demonstrating how Lessing’s often evasive style of adversarial dialogue works in concert with her refusal to be conveniently pigeonholed by academic analysis.

For those readers new to her work, Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival will serve as a useful introduction to Lessing’s concerns and techniques. Those who have long admired her writing will find in this collection new keys to understanding Lessing’s philosophical, political, and psychological complexity.

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Doubters and Dreamers
Janice Gould
University of Arizona Press, 2011
Doubters and Dreamers opens with a question from a young girl faced with the spectacle of Indian effigies lynched and burned “in jest” before UC Berkeley’s annual Big Game against Stanford: “What’s a debacle, Mom?” This innocent but telling question marks the girl’s entrée into the complicated knowledge of her heritage as a mixed-blood Native American of Koyangk’auwi (Concow) Maidu descent. The girl is a young Janice Gould, and the poems and narrations that follow constitute a remarkable work of sustained and courageous self-revelation, retracing the precarious emotional terrain of an adolescence shaped by a mother’s tough love and a growing consciousness of an ancestral and familial past.

In the first half of the book, “Tribal History,” Gould ingeniously repurposes the sonnet form to preserve the stories of her mother and aunt, who grew up when “muleback was the customary mode / of transport” and the “spirit world was present”—stories of “old ways” and places claimed in memory but lost in time. Elsewhere, she remembers her mother’s “ferocious, upright anger” and her unexpected tenderness (“Like a miracle, I was still her child”), culminating in the profound expression of loss that is the poem “Our Mother’s Death.”

In the second half of the book, “It Was Raining,” Gould tells of the years of lonely self-making and “unfulfilled dreams” as she comes to terms with what she has been told are her “crazy longings” as a lesbian: “It’s been hammered into me / that I’ll be spurned / by a ‘real woman,’ / the only kind I like.” The writing here commemorates old loves and relationships in language that mingles hope and despair, doubt and devotion, veering at times into dreamlike moments of consciousness. One poem and vignette at a time, Doubters and Dreamers explores what it means to be a mixed-blood Native American who grew up urban, lesbian, and middle class in the West.
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Dragstripping
Poems
Jan Beatty
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024

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Dramatizing Dido, Circe, and Griselda
Louise-Geneviève Gillot de Sainctonge
Iter Press, 2010
One of the most acclaimed French poets from the turn of the eighteenth century and one of the rare women of the time to achieve recognition at court, Louise-Geneviève Gillot de Sainctonge was France’s first female librettist. The current volume provides not only the most in-depth biography of her ever published, but also the first appearance of any of her work in English. It features her two tragic opera libretti, both of which were set to music and staged at the Opéra, a spoken play that constitutes an important precursor of tearful comedy, and a small sampling of her poetry. The three dramatic works give thoughtful portrayals of women of high rank who exemplify traits such as fidelity, integrity and forthrightness, only to find themselves powerless in a misogynist society, where the male heroes turn out to be inglorious.
—Perry Gethner
Norris Professor of French, Oklahoma State University
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Drawing (in) the Feminine
Bande Dessinée and Women
Edited by Margaret C. Flinn
The Ohio State University Press, 2024

Drawing (in) the Feminine celebrates and examines the richness of contemporary women’s production in French and Francophone comics art and considers the history of representations made by both dominant and marginalized creators. Bridging historical and contemporary comics output, these essays illuminate the interfaces among genre, gender, and cultural history. Contributors from both sides of the Atlantic, and across a variety of methodologies and disciplinary orientations, challenge prevailing claims about the absence of women creators, characters, and readers in bande dessinée, arguing that women have always been part of its history. While still far from achieving parity with their male counterparts, female creators are occupying an increasingly significant portion of the French-language comics publishing industry, and creators of all genders are putting forth stories that reflect on the diversity and richness of women’s and gender-nonconforming people’s experiences. In the essays collected here, contributors push back against the ways in which the marginalization of women within bande dessinée history has overshadowed their significant contributions, extending avenues for further exploring the true diversity of a flourishing contemporary production. 

 

Contributors:  
Armelle Blin-Rolland, Véronique Bragard, Michelle Bumatay, Benoît Crucifix, Isabelle Delorme, Jacques Dürrenmatt, Margaret C. Flinn, Alexandra Gueydan-Turek, Jennifer Howell, Jessica Kohn, Sylvain Lesage, Catriona MacLeod, Mark McKinney 

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front cover of The Dream Women Called
The Dream Women Called
Lori Wilson
Autumn House Press, 2021
Through the poems in The Dream Women Called, Lori Wilson attends to the spirits of depression, uncertainty, and fear while wondering at the beauty in what’s broken, the remarkable in the ordinary, and the balm that the natural world can offer. Following a single speaker, we’re reminded how many lives one woman can live.

This book is about crossing into a new version of your own story—after a marriage ends, the parents die, the children are grown, or the faith is discarded—and finding a place to stand, a new way to take up space in the world. Uniting past and present, these poems create multifaceted portraits, particularly of relationships between mothers and daughters. Wilson’s poems sift through memory, dreams, art, imagination, nature, and close observation, turning each discovery over in order to see it fully. Beneath the fine-grained imagery of these lyric excavations are the sometimes opposing but fundamental desires to be whole and to be seen, which often means looking within as well as turning toward the world outside. The speaker is listening always for the dream women who call, for whatever may beckon from the present and future, preparing her in some way for a life that’s truly hers.
[more]

front cover of The Dream Women Called
The Dream Women Called
Lori Wilson
Autumn House Press, 2021
Through the poems in The Dream Women Called, Lori Wilson attends to the spirits of depression, uncertainty, and fear while wondering at the beauty in what’s broken, the remarkable in the ordinary, and the balm that the natural world can offer. Following a single speaker, we’re reminded how many lives one woman can live.

This book is about crossing into a new version of your own story—after a marriage ends, the parents die, the children are grown, or the faith is discarded—and finding a place to stand, a new way to take up space in the world. Uniting past and present, these poems create multifaceted portraits, particularly of relationships between mothers and daughters. Wilson’s poems sift through memory, dreams, art, imagination, nature, and close observation, turning each discovery over in order to see it fully. Beneath the fine-grained imagery of these lyric excavations are the sometimes opposing but fundamental desires to be whole and to be seen, which often means looking within as well as turning toward the world outside. The speaker is listening always for the dream women who call, for whatever may beckon from the present and future, preparing her in some way for a life that’s truly hers.
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front cover of Duchess and Hostage in Renaissance Naples
Duchess and Hostage in Renaissance Naples
Letters and Orations
Ippolita Maria Sforza
Iter Press, 2017
This volume presents in translation 100 previously unknown letters of Ippolita Maria Sforza (1445–1488), daughter of the Duke of Milan, who was sent at age twenty to marry the son of the infamously brutal King Ferrante of Naples. Sforza’s letters display the adroit diplomacy she used to strengthen the alliance between Milan and Naples, then the two most powerful states in Italy, amid such grave crises as her brother’s assassination in Milan and the Turkish invasion of Otranto. Still, Ippolita lived as a hostage at the Neapolitan court, subject not only to the threat of foreign invasion but also to her husband’s well-known sexual adventures and her father-in-law’s ruthlessness. Soon after Ippolita’s mysterious death in 1488, the fraught Naples-Milan alliance collapsed.
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