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Thank you, poetry.
I’m writing this last blog post while looking out the window at my dad’s summer garden, thinking about all the animals and insects and leafy things making things work outside. I’m thinking, too, about all the people who write, read, and perform poems, and how they are everywhere in the world, feeding and tilling and fertilizing and germinating and creating harvest with their words. I hope these three issues of
Poetry have done one or all of those things for you, and I look forward to seeing the work of all other editors, guest and otherwise.
Grade: A Combining classical music with not-so-classical dance, Ephrat Asherie Dance blurs the lines in Odeon, a magnificent celebration of movement and art. Despite Wednesday night’s ominous forecast, the only thunder came from the crowd seated facing the Rivers Green stage: Audience members were invited to respond vocally to anything that moved them, and Wednesday’s […]
The inventor of the speculum, J. Marion Sims, is celebrated as the father of modern gynecology, and a memorial at his birthplace honors his service to suffering women, empress and slave alike. These tributes whitewash the fact that Sims achieved his surgical breakthroughs by experimenting on eleven enslaved African American women. Lent to Sims by their owners, these women were forced to undergo operations without their consent. Today, the names of all but three of these women are lost.
In
Mend: Poems, Kwoya Fagin Maples gives voice to the enslaved women named in Sims s autobiography: Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy. In poems exploring imagined memories and experiences relayed from hospital beds, the speakers challenge Sims s lies, mourn their trampled dignity, name their suffering in spirit, and speak of their bodies as bruised fruit. At the same time, they are more than his victims, and the poems celebrate their humanity, their feelings, their memories, and their selves. A finalis