A Woman Is Talking To Death
Poem
Judy Grahn; Karen Sjöholm
It’s also one of the most beautiful pieces about death I’ve ever read. It’s an impossible poem to pigeonhole. It’s very lengthy, first of all, and covers a lot of ground. It’s a story about a traffic accident; an incantation (many repeating lines throughout); a commentary on the challenges (and loneliness) of being an out lesbian in the seventies; and a defiant clap back to death’s thieving ways — death, who “wastes our time with drunkenness and depression/death, who keeps us from our lovers.”
Grahn weaves themes and metaphors and historical references and present day events lyrically and poignantly. Policemen as agents of death; racism in the criminal justice system; the personal destruction wrought by a homophobic society; the European witch trials all appear and connect with certain repetitive lines that structure the skeleton of the poem. Grahn believes that poets build community by “making cross connections and healing the torn places in the social fabric of myth we have all inherited, but that the outcast especially inherits.”
The narrator, powerless in so many of the situations she’s detailed throughout the poem, stands in her power as she directly challenges death. She finishes the poem laughing at death, determined not to bequeath her life to death, but rather to her lovers. And at that point she has expanded the word “lovers” to include her lesbian lover Wendy; the lesbians in the military who went down with her when she was kicked out; a classmate of hers who became pregnant while they were still in junior high; and a host of others. ~ Ellary Allis (Blog Writer, SevenPonds)
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Details
| ISBN | 9780884470199 |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Publication Date | 1974 |
| Publisher | Women’s Press Collective |
| Format | Trade Paperback |
| No. of Pages | 19 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | NotRated |
| BookID | 14769 |
