Trickster Feminism
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
New from celebrated poet and performer Anne Waldman - an edgy, visionary collection that meditates on gender, existence, passion and activism
Mythopoetics, shape shifting, quantum entanglement, Anthropocene blues, litany and chance operation play inside the field of these intertwined poems, which coalesced out of months of protests with some texts penned in the streets. Anne Waldman looks to the imagination of mercurial possibility, to the spirits of the doorway and of crossroads, and to language that jolts the status quo of how one troubles gender and outwits patriarchy. She summons Tarot's Force Arcana, the passion of the suffragettes, and various messengers and heroines of historical, hermetic, and heretical stance, creating an intersectionality of lived experience: class, sexuality, race, politics all enter the din. These are experiments of survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Acclaimed poet Waldman (Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born) plumbs the variations and nuances of female subjectivity and paths to liberation through the performance of words and rituals. In her opener, "trick o' death," she lambastes capitalism as "the titular rape mode of quest & scheme," directing readers to meet her "on the other edge of town" in order to hatch a plot to "take down the big horrible men." Waldman references such mythical female figures as the Lady of the Lake, Callisto, and the Gorgons while crafting legends of her own, including one involving a coven of women living underground, plotting revolution: "maybe we could have a parable about craving soil under avenues, hope & fear. Times of the chthonic." She suggests that readers "secede from the vocabulary they give you" and provides her own view of what this might look like through poems that tend to be long meditations on a theme, but which vary widely in form. Waldman's erudite and experimental language is notable in such poems as "entanglement," where she riffs on the names of famous women writers, i.e., "Wall stone craft" and "Auld tray lured." The collection is fragmentary and obtuse, even for Waldman, and requires some decoding, but the subtext is a rich and stirring commentary on feminine empowerment.
