Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives

Poetry. Women's Studies. FEMINISTS ARE PASSING FROM OUR LIVES takes a searching look back over the years since the so-called sexual revolution, the various waves of feminism, the civil rights movement, and the daily struggles of trying to live fully, justly, fairly, and with heart. Can it be done without heartbreak? No, says McGrath, but we're not done yet. This is a book for fighters, thinkers, for those who want our days to accumulate into something of substance and beauty, in spite of our mistakes, and no matter what we face. Once in a while you'll find a poet you realize has felt everything a person can feel. We all have, of course, but unless we write it we haven't really felt everything. Leslie McGrath chronicles her life and uses it as a foundation to understand others. The tone is candor and the book gets high marks for turning realism into lyricism. When hard subjects threaten to gain momentum, musicality and imagery are their redemption. The title is cautionary. The book is a resolution with intimate stories, full disclosures, and smart perspectives. There's something interesting that happens when a poet bares her soul. It makes us kinder.--Grace Cavalieri, Midwest Book Review

About the Author :
Leslie McGrath is the author of Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage; Out From the Pleiades; Toward Anguish; and By the Windpipe. Winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and the Gretchen Warren Prize from the New England Poetry Club, McGrath has published widely, including in Agni, Poetry, The Academy of American Poets, The Writer's Chronicle, and The Yale Review. She teaches creative writing at Central Connecticut State University and currently serves as judge for the Yeats Poetry Prize. She lives in Essex, CT, with her husband Bill Taylor, a shipwright.

Review :
Kickass and funny, daring and unabashed, Leslie McGrath's Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives entices language to dance deep into the night. --Annie Finch, author of Spells and Among the Goddesses The poems in Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives resound with a fiercely lyrical force that propels a full range of human emotion--grief, joy anger, loss, ambivalence, love--through these poems like a stirring interior wind. Writing with an inherent sense of uncertainty's ironic poetic strength, McGrath infuses her speakers with the Socratic conceit for wisdom, namely "being sure of very little." "Let the gentleman/ in pleated khakis/ pressed for time// claim it," she writes, "The certainty/ not the poem." The evocative uncertainty that emanates from McGrath's "negative capability" conjures hard-won truths with deft figurative leaps--"What have I become? Talking Mynah bird"--, heartbreaking conclusions--"Hell is furious daughters"--, and cold-eyed plain speech--"Once finished, we'll flame out, God or no." In an age of rampant subterfuge, false certainty, and a diminution of strong feminist voices, McGrath voice provides a welcome yawp that weds intensely personal narratives to the larger public theater of our daily lives in contemporary America. --Chard deNiord, author of Interstate and The Double Truth