200 pages; The Library of America
Beginning in the 1960s, poets like Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Diane Di Prima, and Sonia Sanchez began coming out—from the closet and the kitchen and the bedroom—to read and write about how they lived. For women, wrote Audre Lorde, "poetry is not a luxury" but a necessary way of dealing with gender, power, and race, sometimes with fury, sometimes with expansive joy.
Below, from Honor Moore's rich anthology,
Poems from the Women's Movement (The Library of America), a slice of life by Elsa Gidlow.
You say I am mysterious
Let me explain myself:
In a land of oranges
I am faithful to apples
