Women's Voices For Change

The three poems here by Rajzel Żychlińsky all express how the Holocaust shadowed her life, forming for her what she describes as a “fourth dimension,” as if it invented its own physics and warped reality itself.

The things that matter to the poet—her own body, her children, a country on the brink of the Trump administration, and the injured planet—all appear to be under siege, just like her eardrums. The poem smacks of catastrophe far beyond the speaker’s self-described “mid-life crisis.”

Catherine Abbey Hodges points us to the work of her friend and mentor, Peter Everwine, in what is both elegy and homage in an uncommon, traditional form called a glosa or glossa—which aims to take something good and incorporate it into something also good but different.

  Lamentation for the Children   Children come, bringing bliss and wretchedness. They come ready to be bruised. Chain us with the soft tentacles of their openness. Leave us pierced and threaded, bound for time with thorns, singing behind the palings of love. Like children. Though we are not. Don’t look back, not once, at the trembling in your arms,…

Kim Shuck’s relationship to the reader seems essential to this voice, even more than her relationship to language. It’s as if she’s speaking directly into our ears, sitting next to us on a bench and resuming an intense conversation we’ve been having on and off for years.

Like an adolescent who demands to be seen and heard. This poem is meant to disturb, and it does—spectacularly.

Ostriker’s solution in "during the bombing of Kosovo" is to address the issue of timelessness itself—the way humans have slaughtered each other since the start.