Kirjahaku

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Fiction. Drama. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. Compiled in one book for the first time, featuring both new and out of print pieces, the contents of THE JUDY GRAHN READER span four decades of work by the prominent writer and activist. This volume contains writing from every phase of Judy Grahn's career, including poems from all of her major poetry collections, such as The Common Woman, A Woman is Talking to Death, and the previously unpublished Mental; a number of her groundbreaking essays (Writing from a House of Women and the newly revised Ground Zero: The Rise of Lesbian Feminism, among others); as well as selected fiction and the full-length play The Queen of Swords. As Judy Grahn's writing continues to be relevant in today's social, political and cultural climate, this comprehensive volume gathers the varying strands of her writing and makes visible the tremendous scope of her ongoing contribution as a feminist thinker, activist, and literary artist. Judy Grahn is the direct inheritor of that passion for life in the woman poet, that instinct for true power, not domination, which poets like Barrett Browning, Dickinson, H.D., were asserting in their own very different ways and voices.--Adrienne RichJudy Grahn has done more to create a women's literature than any other writer in the past half century.--Ron Silliman

Through these seven narrative poems, Grahn weaves real-life conditions with goddess mythology to construct modern interpretations of lamentation in nine parts. Song and poem lamentations have a widespread history from all over the globe and carry a wealth of forms and a few requirements—they must read well out loud, they must address current pressing issues, and they must make every attempt to be truthful. Here Grahn’s steadfast and rhythmic verse directs our eyes to crucial yet often buried tribulations of our times by critiquing white supremacy, honoring battered women, exalting the powers of menstruation, conflating all labor with birth imagery, and revealing lateral hostilities among potential allies—all in order to arouse a meaningful social critique.

Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit illustrates with true stories that we live in an interactive, aware world in which the creatures around us in our neighborhoods know us and sometimes reach across to us, empathically and helpfully. Implications are that all beings live in a possible “common mind” from which our mass culture has disconnected, but which is only a heartbeat and some concentrated attention away. This mind encompasses microbial life and insects as well as creatures and extends to nonmaterial intelligence as well—that is to say, spirit. Creatures as varied as a collaborating dragonfly, ants rescuing each other, a sympathetic lizard, an empathic coyote, gift-giving squirrels, crazed birds, and lots of very mysteriously smart cats inhabit the stories. Precognition, dreams, paranormal experiences with birds, psychic communications with cats, visitations from ghosts with messages, rolling earth spirits—not supernatural, they seem natural enough but not visible to everyone. The intention of this book is to help people catch interactions they themselves experience with nonhuman and even disembodied beings, and who could use some support for recalling since these interactions make clear we live in a sentient world.

love belongs to those who do the feeling—an exciting collection of new and selected poetry by Judy Grahn. The book contains selections from Judy's entire body of poetic work from The Work of a Common Woman, The Queen of Wands and The Queen of Swords, to new poems written between 1997 and 2008. Judy's poetry is rangy and provocative. It has been written at the heart of so many of the important social movements of the last forty years that the proper word is foundational—Judy Grahn's poetry is foundational to the spirit of movement. People consistently report that Judy's poetry is also uplifting—an unexpected side effect of work that is aimed at the mind as well as the heart. Judy continues to insist that love goes beyond romance, to community, and that community goes beyond the everyday world, to the connective worlds of earth and spirit.

WINNER of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology’s Sarasvati Nonfiction Book Award! Path-breaking lesbian poet & scholar Judy Grahn returns to the stories of Inanna the Mesopotamian goddess of erotic love and justice to reimagine the contemporary world.In her trademark lusciously erotic writing, Judy Grahn illuminates eight dramatic stories exploring the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna’s power and relevance for contemporary queer feminist audiences. Psychologically rich, morally and ethically exhilarating, passionate and full of life, these stories reimagine central western myths, including the book of Job and Gilgamesh with women and queer people as central actors. In every sentence, Grahn proves how revisiting origin stories is a vital world-making activity.

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. LGBT Studies. Growing up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, the lean child of working-class Chicago transplants, Judy Grahn hungered to connect with the larger world, to create a place for herself beyond the deprivations and repressions of small town, 1950s life. Refusing the imperative to silence that was her inheritance as a woman and as a lesbian, Grahn found her way to poetry, to activism, and to the intoxicating beauty and power of openly loving other women. In the process, she emerged not only as one of the most inspirational and influential figures of the gay women's liberation movement, but as a poet whose vision and craft has helped to give voice to long-unexplored dimensions of women's political and spiritual existence.In telling her life story, Grahn reflects on the profound cultural shifts brought about by the women's and gay rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The simple revolution she recounts involved not just the formation of new institutions (the Women's Press Collective, Oakland Feminist Women's Health Center, A Woman's Place Bookstore), but the creation of whole new ways of living, including collective feminist households that cut through the political and social isolation of women.Throughout, Grahn describes her involvement with iconic scenes and figures from the history of these years--the Altamont Music Festival, the Black Panthers, the imprisoned Manson women, the Weather Underground, Inez Garc a--sometimes as witness, sometimes as participant, sometimes as instigator. Looking at these events and people within the context of the women's movement, and through the prism of Judy Grahn's luminous poetic sensibility, we see them anew.In A SIMPLE REVOLUTION, Grahn refuses dramatic, psychological narratives that readers have come to expect in memoirs. What emerges is a new, deeply compelling story, grounded in honesty, humility, and compassion--compassion for herself and for the wonderful, if wounded, people who surround her...striking an artful balance between remembering her past, the past of others, and intervening politically in how we think about history.--Julie Enzer

This book gathers poems on Goddesses by accomplished poets from around the world. The Goddesses invoked are Aruru, Atabeyra, Brigid, Cybele, Dalia, Friya, Kali, Nana Buruku, Neeli Mariamman, Nyx, Saraswati, Xori, and Zemyna. The poets are Ann Filemyr, Annie Finch, Judy Grahn, Anna Halberstadt, Yona Harvey, Jurgita Jasponyte, Raina Leon, Mary Mackey, Marianela Medrano, Monica Mody, Purvi Shah, Richelle Slota, and Arundhati Subramaniam. Each poem is followed by the poet's comments and some information on the Goddess. A video of these poems performed by the poets is being produced by Poetry Witch Ritual Theater in conjunction with the book. Both projects are created as part of the 2021 Symposium of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, honoring the centennial of Marija Gimbutas.The mission of Poetry Witch Press is to serve the needs of Poetry Witch Community; to support the return of the Divine Feminine through poetry and magic; and to share and celebrate the art and craft of meter, form, and rhythm. Poetry Witch Press was founded by poet Annie Finch in 2021.