CHOOSING poems for the weekly Thursday Poem slot and monthly review hinges on what arrives via email, new collections, gleanings from leftist culture magazines and broad left anthologies. 

My previous reviews and selections for April and July both featured single collections by men, but this month it’s all women poets, varying in age, style, publishing history and topic and who collectively contradict the kind of stereotypes that once confined women’s writing to “ecriture feminine,” taken apart in Elma Mitchell’s 1967 poem Thoughts After Ruskin, and available online:

Women reminded him of lilies and rosies,/ Me they remind rather of blood and soap,/ Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses,/ Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places:// Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,/ Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,/ Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving,/ Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverizing,/ - All the terrible chemistry of their kitchen.