This poetry collection includes queer writers across multiple identities. It’s a celebration of the LGBTQ+ community even through times of hardship. With pieces that uplift our very existence to poems filled with rage and pain, this collection captures what it means to be human at the intersection of many marginalized identities. Below are just a few of the sapphic poets and their works for review.
Caridad Moro-Gronlier
In “What the White Girl Asked at Our 20th High School Reunion,” Moro-Gronlier studies the intersectionality of identities. She highlights the difference of what it means to be a girl and grow into a woman as a Latina, compared to white American culture.
She finds beauty in a fat body in “When You Go Home with the Fat Chick,” confronting the fatphobia we’re taught by our culture and society.
In “At Least I Didn’t Rape You,” she describes being on a date with a man who looks at a woman passing by. He admits that he would rape that woman, given the chance. And he tells the poet she’s lucky he didn’t rape her. The simple, matter of fact tone used to convey this scene puts misogyny under the spotlight, showing how calm women are expected to remain in the face of such violence.
“Cuban-American Lexicon” displays how language teaches us the roles we’re meant to play. It reveals how these roles can lock us into social prisons, like marrying a man and becoming his property.
Cathleen Chambless
Chambless tackles the sense of isolation in her poem, “Alienation.” Even when surrounded by people you know, she wonders why we experience these feelings.
Through references to punk songs, “Sugarcoated” does the exact opposite in throwing light on the abhorrent violence women experience. Each verse shows in gruesome detail what happens to women when they don’t conform to social norms. When addressing the violence and pain they put themselves through in an effort to comply, it’s not a judgment but an observation.
Although she only has two poems featured in the collection, they deftly exemplify how poetry can be a political call to action to demand justice for the wrongs society has done to our communities.
Celeste Gainey
Gainey’s “more/less” interrogates how queerness transcends the labels we choose to define ourselves. They’re useful tools for identity, but not the only thing that matters.
“in the days of early polyester” explores how clothes and fashion are markers that express gender, masculinity or feminity.
Her poem “in our nation’s capital” takes on a topic all too familiar with the LGBTQ+ community. In the face of the AIDS epidemic and losing so many loved ones, they find a moment of defiance through sexual acts deemed taboo by our society.
cin salach
salach meditates on the gender fluidity of bisexuality in “Bi Sexual.” She continues this train of thought in “Why we wander.” Contemplating the act of travel and its connection to the role women play, she compares it to sexuality and being a mother at over 40 years old. “I took the sexuality less travelled and that made all the difference.”
Her poems speak to each other as she delves into a reflection of motherhood and faith in “Now.” It’s a look into how we change and grow as we get older, the different characteristics that become superpowers.
Elizabeth Bradfield
In “Dispatch from this Summer,” Bradfield contemplates nature’s penchant for rebirth and new beginnings. It’s a glimmer of hope as she ruminates on the lives lost to the Orlando night club shooting at Pulse.
“Learning to Swim” poses water as a danger for drowning, but also something that can be overcome with the proper support. Using fluid structure and rhythm that mimics the motion of water, she unspools the metaphor for the importance of community, how we hold each other and keep one another from dying.
Ellen Bass
Bass’s “Taking Off the Front of the House” describes scenes of domestic life together like a play unfolding on stage. She romanticizes the ordinary and turns it into the extraordinary. It’s a poignant vignette as queer people often don’t get to see themselves simply living and loving.
In “The Small Country,” she paints a picture of two women lying in bed together, reveling in each other’s bodies. She uses the metaphor of a small country with a language all their own that still doesn’t encompass the depth of feeling and connection.
There are so many other poets in this collection that speak to the sapphic and queer experience. From Farah Milagros Yamini (they/them) who conveys the expansiveness of sensuality across languages in a piece that mixes English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, to Gem Blackthorn’s interrogation of how bisexuality is often deemed an aberration, even within queer communities.
These poems paint a picture of pain and strife, but also of resistance and hope. Some even harken back to queer poets of the past, like Muriel Rukeyser, reminding us that we have always been here, and we will continue to exist no matter how hard they try to erase us.
Leave a Reply