The Virgin Mary is surely the most written, painted, sculpted, and sung-about woman in Western history, but she appears in just a few passages in the Bible—always in the context of her more famous son. Did she have more children? Did she and Joseph love each other? What did her neighbors think of her (“That Mary—she thinks she’s so special!”)? Christian tradition frames her as the perfect, sinless woman, but what does that mean, exactly?
When I accepted three of Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s poems I didn’t realize that, in different ways, they were about the dialogue of life and death. That’s a measure of her variety of tone and her skill as both a poet and a storyteller. In “To Live,” a father is killed by a cluster bomb as he protects his child with his body. (Well, there are worse ways to go, like “a bullet / to the head,
THIS ISSUE BRINGS together two poets we were thrilled to publish in the Women’s Review of Books, and they couldn’t be more different. Linda Bamber infuses her poems with a Buddhist sense of detachment—or rather, the hope of detachment, which life so often defeats. In “Nirvana,” she’s embroiled in the comedy of dailiness: a missing can opener, a visit from the plumber, computer problems, friendship problems, just . . . problems! Nirvana has never seemed
OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK, I watched all twenty-four episodes of the anime Parasyte: The Maxim (2014–2015). Big picture, it reframes the relationships of hosts, parasites, and invasive species in perceptive and disturbing ways. Do all living things have a right to life? Is humanity the invasive species of earth? Narratively, Shinichi, age seventeen, is partially infected by a murderous corkscrew cyclops and has to learn to live with “Migi” (his literal right hand, now quite maternal,
In Sync I worked a bunch of minimum wage jobs in college, hard-selling suede bomber jackets at Wilson’s Leather, guzzling Frangelico-flavored coffee while reading Backlash at a failing coffee shop, and nude modeling for figure drawing classes. That last one paid twice the hourly wage of the others, but the real pay-off was the impact that holding a pose (nude, for two to three hours, in front of my peers) had on me as a
Almost sixty years ago, a girl at the University of Chicago was pregnant and suicidal. Her brother begged another student (a member of CORE and SDS) to find an abortion provider. The student “hadn’t thought about the issue before” but approached this as a good deed and found a doctor. Word traveled, and soon the student was swamped with calls from desperate women. To retain privacy and stay out of jail, she told callers to
Anne Heche, who died suddenly in August, was seventeen in 1987, when she began playing the twins Marley and Vicky on Another World, my favorite soap. Marley was a kindly drip in mauve Ann Taylor suits and a pained smile. Vicky, the conniver, had bouncy hair and dressed like Olivia Newton-John at the end of Grease. Even in comas after separate car accidents, Marley was a pill and Vicky was the draw. A decade later,
Some people find the analogy of mothers and daughters to describe intrafeminist generational tension annoying and inaccurate, but not me. Chapter six of Manifesta, my book with Amy Richards (2000), is titled “Thou Shalt Not Become Thy Mother” and ends with an open letter to “older feminists,” the theme of which is “you’re not the boss of me!” Mothers are everything to children at the beginning of life, and maturing is the child learning to
Magazines used to be valuable—an important medium to read, to write for, in which to be covered. This past week, I counted how many magazines I was sent despite not being a subscriber—Time, Scientific American, Vanity Fair, People, Wired, and National Geographic—all of which, pathetically, wind up in the recycling bin after a cursory glance. I’m not sure why I’m on these comp lists, but I’d guess it is that the magazine industry is collapsing
A quick (yet somehow exhaustive) memory inventory of where I glimpsed feminism while growing up in Fargo in the 1970s and 1980s: My purple, clothbound Free to Be . . . You and Me book and accompanying record My Judy Blume books, especially Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Forever Mom’s subscription to Ms. The first Simon & Schuster edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, where I read about masturbation, lesbians, and abortion Mom’s
