Sapphic Classic

For over fifty years, Joan Nestle has been chronicling lesbian and queer life boldly with guts, heart, and moral suasion. A Sturdy Yes of a People gathers Nestle' s most influential writing into a single volume presenting her persistent involvement in liberation movements, LGBTQ histories, erotic writing, and archives that document gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer lives. Embedded in tales of lesbian desire are Nestle's concerns with the power of class and race in America to exile bodies. A bold and original thinker, deeply connected with her communities, with an abiding willingness to reexamine and reimagine queer lives by integrating new ideas, challenges, and experiences, Nestle dazzles as a powerful thinker, writer, and theorist. This new collection features an introduction by scholar Carolyn D' Cruz, a foreword by Yeva Johnson, and an afterword by Susie Bright. This new volume provides a vibrant context for contemporary readers to engage with Joan Nestle' s historically significant and dynamic work.

In 1985, Judy Grahn boldly declared that lesbians have a poetic tradition and mapped it from Sappho to the present day in the groundbreaking book The Highest Apple. With her characteristic ferocious intellect, passion for historical research, careful close readings, and dynamic storytelling, Grahn situated poetry by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich Paula Gunn Allen, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Olga Bromas as central to lesbian culture-and more radically as central to society as a whole.In this new and updated edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition, Grahn revisits the original text and amplifies it with a more in depth consideration of Pat Parker and in conversation with two younger lesbian poets, Alicia Mountain and Alyse Knorr, demonstrating the continued relevance and dynamism of The Highest Apple. A new introduction by Grahn and six responses by contemporary poets Donika Kelly, Kim Shuck, Serena Chopra, Zoe Tuck, Saretta Morgan, and Khadijah Queen highlight the ongoing significance of The Highest Apple to readers, writers, and thinkers.

Fire-Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems gathers poems from Lynn Lonidier' s rich and varied collections. Lonidier published five poetry collections Po Tree (1967), The Female Freeway (1970), A Lesbian Estate (1977), Woman Explorer (1979), Clitoris Lost: A Woman' s Version of the Creation Myth (1989), and a posthumous book, The Rhyme of the Ag-ed Mariness (2001). Her poetry links multiple poetic constellations of the 1970s and 1980s demonstrating linguistic innovations and radical reconfigurations sexuality and gender. The poems of Fire-Rimmed Eden are in conversation with narrative impulses from the feminist and lesbian poetry movements of the 1970s and 1980s, including work by Judy Grahn, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and others, as well as experimental poetic impulse from the same period found in work by Robert Duncan (Duncan' s partner Jess gave the cover art for A Lesbian Estate), Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, and Etel Adnan. Some of Lonidier' s work is concrete in the spirit of May Swenson' s Iconographs while other poems are performative like Bay area poets Pat Parker and Jerome Rothenberg. Previously completely out of print, Lonidier' s poetry is ripe for a new generation of readers. Fire-Rimmed Eden assembles a robust selection of Lonidier' s work introduced by Sinister Wisdom editor and publisher Julie R. Enszer. Rich and diverse, visually and aurally exciting, boldly experimental and intellectually provocative, Lonidier' s poetry is imbued with wit, humor, originality, and play.

Minnie Bruce Pratt's Crime Against Nature was the 1989 Lamont Poetry Selection from the Academy of American Poets, which recognizes a poet's second collection of poetry. Crime Against Nature has been long out of print, until now. This new edition includes an introduction by Julie R. Enszer, a new afterword by Pratt, a reprint of Pratt's speech at the Lamont award ceremony, photographs of Pratt and her family, and a bibliography.

Elana Dykewomon's poetry bears witness to the lives of lesbians. She asks and demands that we be responsible and responsive to one another; that we bring care, compassion, accountability, and love in the proper proportions. These poems help us understand the contours of sexism, homophobia, racism, and antisemitism. They are poems that illuminate what we can ask from and offer one another. Drawing on Dykewomon' s impressive body of poetry, What Can I Ask: New and Selected Poems 1975-2015 assembles into a single volume poems from Dykewomon' s three published collections, They Will Know Me By My Teeth (Megaera Press, 1976), Fragments from Lesbos (Diaspora Distribution, 1981), and Nothing Will Be As Sweet as the Taste (Onlywomen Press, 1995), as well as a selection of newer, uncollected poems. Dykewomon continues asking questions and reaching for answers, demonstrating the power of poetry to comfort and enrage, inspire and arouse.

The best of Chocolate Waters' poetry finds its home in Melting in Your Mouth: The Early Work of Chocolate Waters. During the Women's Liberation Movement, Waters traveled around the United States to share her erotic, angry, and feminine poems, gathering throngs of lesbian admirers. Waters was a modern-day lesbian-feminist bard performing her poems with theatrical flair. Waters' poems grapple with gender norms, sexual harassment, and hetero-patriarchal publishing expressing the rage that comes with experiencing the second-class citizenry of womanhood. Even more radical, Waters' writes of lesbian intimacy and sex, calling attention to nuances of family and belonging in the context of her identity as a lesbian. Melting in Your Mouth is a treasury of Waters' early work. As witness to and participation in Gay Liberation and the Women's Liberation Movement of the seventies and eighties, Waters' poems also witness a genealogy of living and laughing authentically against all odds.

We meet Joanna "John" Montolivet as she discovers the nature of the world and God's existence from her infancy to juvenescence. John dreams of the erotic and splendid, expressing her yearning through writing, reading great books of literature, and admiring the female figure and sensibility. Coming of age in a discordant family with a "famine" in her heart, she longs for love and passion, leading her to Catholicism, and most importantly, a desire for women. The desire for same-sex attraction meets at the intersection of the physical and the spiritual in Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul. First published under the male pseudonym Christopher St. John in 1915, Christabel Marshall's work is regarded as the first Catholic lesbian novel. Unlike lesbian novels of the fin de siÈcle and The New Woman Movement, John's journey of sapphic spirituality and sexuality is not a phase, but the beginning of a lifelong reverence of women. Written at a time of violent censorship and sexual oppression, Marshall's characters represent lesbian, trans, and androgynous people, thinly masked as cisgender and heterosexual. In this publication of Hungerheart, twenty-first-century readers can enjoy Marshall's deeply spiritual love of women in its full glory.

In 1984, Alexis De Veaux independently published and distributed Blue Heat. Mainstream publishing's interest in work by radical Black women was waning and De Veaux knew that she could reach women with the poems in Blue Heat directly---and she knew they needed these poems.Forty years later, Blue Heat is a Sapphic Classic from Sinister Wisdom with a stunning new introduction and guiding exercises for engaging the poems by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. In Blue Heat, De Veaux insists on survival and encourages risk-taking. In these poems, liberation is necessary, and there is only one means to achieve it: by creating a spark. Blue Heat brings intensity akin to the deepest, hottest part of a flame. Like its namesake, this poetry collection is flammable, igniting courage in its readers, achieving De Veaux goal of kindling a spirit of "power, joy and change" in the Black feminist communities.

Living as a Lesbian is Cheryl Clarke's paean to lesbian life. Filled with sounds from her childhood in Washington, DC, the riffs of jazz musicians, and bluesy incantations, Living as a Lesbian sings like a marimba, whispering "i am, i am in love with you." Living as a Lesbian chronicles Clarke's years of literary and political activism with anger, passion, and determination. Clarke mourns the death of Kimako Baraka ("sister of famous artist brother"), celebrates the life of Indira Gandhi, and chronicles all kinds of disasters- natural and human-made. The world is large in Living as a Lesbian but also personal and intimate. These poems are closely observed and finely wrought, with Clarke's characteristic charm and wit shining throughout. In 1986, Living as a Lesbian captured the vitality and volatility of the lesbian world; today, in a world both changed and unchanged, Clarke's poems continue to illuminate our lives and make new meanings for Living as a Lesbian.

Para las duras: Una fenomonologia lesbiana / For the Hard Ones: A Lesbian Phenomenology, originally published in 2002, is a collection of poetry existing from and beyond the boundaries of language, sexuality, and genre. Each memory, meditation, analysis, and erotic snapshot- featured side-by-side in both English and Spanish- is overlaid with the sexual character, experimental prose, and levity signature to the work of de la tierra. As a bilingual book, For the Hard Ones: A Lesbian Phenomenology / Para las duras: Una fenomonologia lesbiana centers, explores, and reimagines queer Latina sexuality, opening up space for multiple interpretations and transformations. This new edition, published as the sixth Sapphic Classic from Sinister Wisdom, features an introduction by scholars Olga García Echeverría and Maylei Blackwell, a foreword by Myriam Gurba, an essay on de la tierra's periodicals by Sara Gregory, and a tribute to de la tierra by her mother, proving a vibrant context for contemporary engagements with de la tierra's powerful and important work.

Drawing on Dykewomon's impressive body of poetry, What Can I Ask: New and Selected Poems 1975-2015 assembles into a single volume poems from Dykewomon's three published collections, They Will Know Me By My Teeth (Megaera Press, 1976), Fragments from Lesbos (Diaspora Distribution, 1981), and Nothing Will Be As Sweet as the Taste (Onlywomen Press, 1995), as well as a selection of newer, uncollected poems. Dykewomon continues asking questions and reaching for answers, demonstrating the power of poetry to comfort and enrage, inspire and arouse.

Renowned African-American, lesbian-feminist poet and performer Pat Parker wrote five collections of poetry during her lifetime, Jonestown & Other Madness, Movement in Black, Womanslaughter, Pit Stop, and Child of Myself. Parker' s poems appeared in numerous journals, newspapers, and anthologies, and are collected in The Complete Works of Pat Parker. Known for her electric performances of her poems, including on the album Where Would I Be Without You from Olivia Records and Lesbian Concentrate, Parker enchanted audiences with her fire for justice and her belief in change. Parker' s most loved poems are now collected in this accessible volume. Essential Poems by Pat Parker introduces new audiences to Parker' s fire, passion, tenderness, and vision for the world.

The Complete Works of Pat Parker includes Parker' s poetic masterwork, Movement in Black, as well as the poetry collection Jonestown & other madness, in addition to her published essays and other prose, along with two unpublished plays and a number of previously uncollected poems. Editor Julie R. Enszer notes, " The breadth of creative output collected here demonstrates the seriousness of Parker' s overall work as a writer. Beginning in 1963, when she was nineteen years old, and continuing until she died in 1989, Parker took her work as a writer seriously. Gathering as much of it as possible into a single volume invites readers to take it seriously as well."

Pat Parker and Audre Lorde first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and video tapes. Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this correspondence for readers to eavesdrop on Lorde and Parker. They discuss their work as writers as well as intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. Sister Love is a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

Black lesbian feminist, essayist, journalist, poet, author, and cultural worker, Anita Cornwell wrote extensively about her experiences as a Black lesbian in the United States during the twentieth century exposing the innerworkings of heteropatriarchy, misogyny, racism, the Jim Crow South, and white supremacy. A scholar of Black Lesbian Studies, Cornwell wrote the first collection of essays by a Black lesbian, Black Lesbian in White America, published by Naiad Press in 1983. These essays chronicle her experiences battling against misogyny, homophobia, and racism. Her writing also attends to love and familial loss. This reprint of Cornwell's classic essays on being black and lesbian, include a groundbreaking interview that Cornwell did with Audre Lorde. Black Lesbian in White America and Other Writings also includes previous unpublished poetry by Cornwell and features a revelatory introduction by scholar Briona Simone Jones.

In this series of poetic vignettes, Minnie Bruce Pratt explores the fluidity, capaciousness, unpredictability, malleability, and shifting everyday terrains of sex and gender. Written with the eye and style of a poet, S/HE braids memoir with Gloria AnzaldÚa's autohistoria-teorÍa narrating a vibrant period in the lives of Pratt and her lover and spouse Leslie Feinberg. S/HE challenges oppressive frames of respectability and womanhood and traces Pratt's circuitous path navigating sex, gender, and sexuality while coming into her own lesbian identity. Pratt examines the boundaries between masculinity and femininity, noting that they are much more porous than imagined. In fact, liberation requires questioning, crossing, and challenging these binary borders. She theorizes sex and gender as not only grids of legibility and surveillance but as spaces of freedom and dynamism. For Pratt, theory is something we live and breathe and is found in the "eccentric and wandering ways of our daily life." By drawing on the splendid ordinariness of everyday life and quotidian encounters, Pratt gives "theory flesh and breath." She invites reflections about how humans might be-in our bodies, in our politics, and in our messy contradictions of sex and gender.