Women's Voices For Change

In this week’s poems, the fixed forms and elevated diction sound archaic to contemporary ears, but their ideas were revolutionary in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s time and remain relevant today.

I had fun subverting the idea of an "Anniversary Declaration," which one might assume will be momentous and romantic, by addressing the dailiness and occasional strife that can accompany a long marriage, no matter how happy it is. 

Today’s poem reveals its form in its title; an epithalamium is “a song or poem in honor of a bride and bridegroom,” and it derives from the Latin & Greek words epi- (at or near) and thalamos (room or bridal chamber).

The poem evocatively opens with a question: “What if, late in my life, / an old love returned?”

What “Figures” seems to be both expressing and enacting is the infinite interconnectedness of things and the way that metaphor (and other figures of speech) can help us in apprehending that mystery.

I wrote “Tree of Life” after the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, to honor and grieve for my friend, Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, and the other beautiful souls who lost their lives that day.

"Chicago Style Italian Beef" is an ode to Chicago and Rome, two of my favorite cities in the world. It was my first time in Rome when I started to think about how things travel—food, recipes, cultures, and histories, and how we adopt them to our new surroundings and homes.

“Ink on Paper” seems to prioritize unarticulated feeling over rational thought and movement and communication over holding things tightly and trying to preserve  their physical manifestations.