Women's Voices For Change

So many events from the past reappear in a different light, and in that light how often my parenting was found wanting. Can any mother escape blame? We are fallen gods. — Meryl Natchez

My poems “Revision” and “Definitions” were both written out of a need to grapple with my experience of being trapped and defined by my female body—by the physical, biological, often excruciating facts of it—in a way that men are spared.

“I believe that poetry at its best is found rather than written,” Linda Gregg observed in “The Art of Finding.” “What matters to me even more than the shapeliness and the dance of language is what the poem discovers deeper down than gracefulness and pleasures in figures of speech.”

. . . That’s an effective strategy, choosing a title that multiplies associations in the reader’s mind even before the poem is read. It makes me curious to see where Anderson will go from here: Will the poem involve any of these things, or instead, play off of my expectations and surprise me?

This is a sad poem, readers, but one that offers its own comfort, something we need now more than ever.

The first time I read "Citizen," I kept putting it down. At some point, though, it occurred to me that some readers never, ever get to put that book down. So, I finished it, read it again, then did some thinking about why I initially found it hard to read.

The way the chocolate acquires agency in the poem and becomes capable of deliberately and actively arousing desire is the beginning of the speaker’s identification with it.