Honor Moore

Alix Kates Shulma

Two pioneering feminists present a groundbreaking collection recovering a generation's revolutionary insights, bold ideas that in some ways went underground, but are ready to inspire a new generation When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, it exploded into women's consciousnesses like an atom bomb. Soon the women's rights movement, which had largely been focused on labor concerns since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, found new expression in a women's liberation movement, and the consciousness raising groups that began to meet in the 1960s grew into a mutli-racial movement that took on birth control, orgasms, intersectionality, housework, self-defense, childcare, rape, identity, healthcare, abortion, sexual harassment, pornography, prostitution, women's art, and more. Here are the essential visionary and radical writings that made the movement and spurred it onward, in more than 90 selections by over 100 different writers and collectives: from Pauli Murray to bell hooks, the Miss America Pageant protest to the battle over pornography, JANE and abortions in Chicago to the Boston Women's Health Collective, Toni Morrison and Florynce Kennedy to the Combahee River Collective, Susan Griffin to Angela Davis, Gloria Steinem to Susan Faludi, and many more. Focusing especially on writings that captured that electric moment when women exposed for one another the full dimensions of patriarchy in America and created a movement, each piece is expertly introduced with headnotes by writers and activists Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore who experienced the revolutionary ferment of the 1960s and 70s firsthand.

Feminist Writings That Inspired a Revolution (and Still Can)

Women's Liberation!

“In 1965, Sylvia Plath’s posthumous Ariel took the literary world by storm with its fierce and undeniably female voice. For the next 15 years, America saw a historic outpouring of women’s poetry supported by and supporting the women’s movement. As editor Moore points out, poetry was vital to the movement, articulating previously unexpressed lives, empowering others as the poets found their own power. . . . And all who missed these missiles and epistles then will find them still demanding and invigorating.”—Booklist (starred review) “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” These lines by Muriel Rukeyser epitomize the spirit that animated a whole generation of women poets, from the 1960s to the 1980s, who in exploring the unspoken truths of their lives sparked a literary revolution. Honor Moore’s anthology presents fifty-eight poets whose work defines an era, among them Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Sonia Sanchez, May Swenson, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Anne Waldman, Sharon Olds, Diane Di Prima, Lucille Clifton, Judy Grahn, Alice Notley, and Eileen Myles. Here is a fresh and revelatory look at a crucial time in American poetry that presents the full range of its themes and approaches and a generous sampling of its most compelling voices. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

(American Poets Project #28)

Poems from the Women's Movement

Between husbands and wives, sometimes revenge is the best way to get even.

A Fable

Revenge

A daughter's memoir of her mother evolves beautifully into a narrative of the sweeping changes in women's lives in the twentieth century.

A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury

Our Revolution

Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women

The New Women's Theatre

The second collection from the poet Honor Moore, Darling is the kind of poetry that refuses to stay quiet, full of moments so gorgeous and brave you can't resist their power. From the very first pages, there is an inescapable intensity. Hard and melodic, chilly with loss and burning with sensual heat, Moore's words have a profound veracity as she takes on subjects such as longing, death, and sexual desire with a deeply passionate consciousness. Every poem in Darling is radiant with glassy precision. A woman's hair is the color of raw wood, a dead friend is remembered by how he placed objects in a room, two lovers "fall together like answers." Hers are effortless metaphors that pull at your breath, and her ease in conjuring them is simply stunning. Moore's poems always generate excitement, appearing in dozens of publications, including The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Open City, Conjunctions, and American Poetry Review.

Darling

An icon of avant-garde art in the 1920s, Margarett Sargent is nearly unknown today. In a haunting and evocative weave of biography and memoir, her granddaughter unearths for the first time the life of this spirited and brilliant woman, who was committed to self-expression--even at the cost of marriage and family. in color.

The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter

“An eloquent argument for speaking even the most difficult truths.” —New York Times Book Review Paul Moore’s vocation as an Episcopal priest took him— with his wife, Jenny, and their family of nine children—from robber-baron wealth to work among the urban poor, leadership in the civil rights and peace movements, and two decades as the bishop of New York. The Bishop’s Daughter is his daughter’s story of that complex, visionary man: a chronicle of her turbulent relationship with a father who struggled privately with his sexuality while she openly explored hers and a searching account of the consequences of sexual secrets.

The Bishop's Daughter: A Memoir

The author's second collection of poetry showcases her lyricism and eloquence as she takes on death, longing, desire, and other weighty topics. By the author of Memoir. Original.

Catherine Ciepiela

Apparently the first original publication from the New York Review imprint (exclusively a reprint house until now), this collection makes an ideally readable introduction to this sometimes forbidding, internationally admired, poetic group. Fin-de-siecle concerns of love in cafés, of sun and song, flirtation and regret, give way to darker worries as the Russian Revolution runs its course: Blok and Boris Pasternak sound particularly effective in Schmidt's libretto-like, clarified versions, while Akhmatova--grown older, immersed in sorrow--proposes a toast to the terrible world we inhabit/ And to God, who never replied. Editor Catherine Ciepela offers a long and useful introduction, along with capsule biographies of Schmidt's eight poets; poet and biographer Honor Moore adds an epilogue. --Publishers Weekly.

A Book of Russian Poems

The Stray Dog Cabaret

Alix Kates Shulman

Two pioneering feminists present a groundbreaking collection recovering a generation's revolutionary insights for today When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the book exploded into women’s consciousness. Before the decade was out, what had begun as a campaign for women’s civil rights transformed into a diverse and revolutionary movement for freedom and social justice that challenged many aspects of everyday life long accepted as fixed: work, birth control and abortion, childcare and housework, gender, class, and race, art and literature, sexuality and identity, rape and domestic violence, sexual harassment, pornography, and more. This was the women’s liberation movement, and writing—powerful, personal, and prophetic—was its beating heart. Fifty years on, in the age of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, this visionary and radical writing is as relevant and urgently needed as ever, ready to inspire a new generation of feminists. Activists and writers Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore have gathered an unprecedented collection of works—many long out-of-print and hard to find—that catalyzed and propelled the women’s liberation movement. Ranging from Friedan’s Feminine Mystique to Backlash, Susan Faludi’s Reagan-era requiem, and framed by Shulman and Moore with an introduction and headnotes that provide historical and personal context, the anthology reveals the crucial role of Black feminists and other women of color in a decades long mass movement that not only brought about fundamental changes in American life—changes too often taken for granted today—but envisioned a thoroughgoing revolution in society and consciousness still to be achieved.

Honor Moore

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