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,…

Marilyn Chin, who was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon, has spent a 30-year career fusing cultures, exploring how her ancestry meets her personal, political, and poetic life.

This evocative narrative of motherhood almost did not emerge because the poet feared it was too sweet. (Do male poets worry as much about this when they write about their children? I wonder.)

Francine Sterle’s “The Way Back” enchanted me from the first time I read it. First, her lush lyricism. Then, the poem’s payoff, an ending that is emotional without being the least bit sentimental. What draws me back again and again, though, is the way she controls breath on the page.

I call what Ortiz has done here semi-surreal because she presents enough concrete detail to ground us even as those flocks of words flit around dreamlike in their stunning aviary.