MY NEW ESSAY

Speaking of obsession content and subject matter, my newest essay is about one of my obsessive issues, death. It’s published online at ICORN. Take a look at the essay and the fantastic work that ICORN is doing.

When Women Poets Die Young: Feminist Meditations on Life and Death and Poetry

I.

Death is a universal experience and it is the job of poets to bear witness to the universal through the close observation of the particular. For women poets, early death and suicide, the fates of Nadia Anjuman and Reetika Vazirani respectively, are writ large in our collective narratives. Plath and Sexton are the canonical examples in poetry, Woolf in prose. In some ways, all women writers feel the strictures of these tragic narratives. These famous icons and the narratives they impose continue to hamper contemporary women writers from conceptualizing themselves as writers and from imagining a long, prolific, and productive life. Despite the fact that we now live in a world of long-lived and prominent women poets, including Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, Grace Paley, and May Sarton among many others, the spectre of death and suicide lingers.

Click here to read the rest of the essay.