The lyrics of Sappho are the earliest surviving examples of explicitly homoerotic literature and have often been analyzed in terms of their revelations about the island society of Lesbos. This volume examines Sappho's poetry through the lens of lesbian desire. It focuses on the active female gaze in the texts and the narrative voice - one that describes female experience and desires as primary, not secondary to the dominant (male) culture.

This series of short incisive books introduces major figures of the ancient world to the modern general reader, including the essentials of each subject's life, works, and significance for later western civilisation. In the newly created tradition of the "Ancients in Action" series, Marguerite Johnson has written a fascinating and accessible account of what remains of the life and works of the Greek poet, Sappho. Sappho's ancient biography is covered in addition to the post-classical accounts of her life, which continue to appear, in a variety of creative and non-creative contexts, in contemporary literature and art. Sappho's poetry, essentially preserved in tantalising fragments, is discussed in a series of thematic chapters that include her religious writings, particularly directed to the goddess of love, Aphrodite; personal interpretations of mythological themes; marriage hymns; and love songs to female companions.

Dwelling in Possibility cuts across conventional boundaries between critical and creative writing by featuring the work of both women poets and feminist critics as they explore and exemplify the relationship between gender and poetic genres. The contributors suggest new ways of thinking and writing about poetry in light of contemporary questions about history and identity. Most of the contributions are published here for the first time.

This is a concept from physics in which it is surmised that small actions can have enormous consequences, and that the flutter of a butterfly's wing on one side of the world can cause devastating storms on the other side. This work includes poems on a range of subjects, including death, history, culture physics, and more.

Collection of poems from 25 years of Sojourner For much of its history Sojourner was the most widely circulated feminist literary journal in America, and more than 1,200 poems have appeared in its pages since it began publication in 1975. Nearly 150 of those poems are collected in this volume, where together they form a powerful testament to the vibrancy, wit, and diversity of feminist poetry. In addition to works by such well-known poets as Molly Peacock, Nikki Giovanni, Betsy Sholl, and Adrienne Rich, this collection includes poems by women from a host of different backgrounds, including many whose work appeared in print for the first time in Sojourner. Some of these poems explode with energy, others speak with a haiku-like softness; some discuss love, lust, and sexuality, while others deal with loss, divorce, and revenge. The voices collected here are old and young, rural and urban, straight and gay, from mothers and daughters to wives, lovers, and countless others, all contributing to this anthology's wide-ranging conversation about feminism and feminist poetics.

A deeply complex and beautiful analysis of poetry in its many forms and its use in collaborations with other arts and disciplines.

Provides a collection of travel articles on the culture, cuisine, and everyday life of the Greek city, along with bibliographies and practical tips on transportation, culinary treasures, accommodations, and sights.

Sappho, a towering figure in Western culture, is an exemplary case in the history of classical receptions. There are three prominent reasons for this. Firstly, Sappho is associated with some of the earliest poetry in the classical tradition, which makes her reception history one of the longest we know of. Furthermore, Sappho's poetry promotes ideologically challenging concepts such as female authority and homoeroticism, which have prompted very conspicuous interpretative strategies to deal with issues of gender and sexuality, revealing the values of the societies that have received her works through time. Finally, Sappho's legacy has been very well explored from the perspective of reception studies: important investigations have been made into responses both to her as poet-figure and to her poetry from her earliest reception through to our own time. However, one of the few eras in Sappho's longstanding reception history that has not been systematically explored before this volume is the Roman period. The omission is a paradox. Receptions of Sappho can be traced in more than eighteen Roman poets, among them many of the most central authors in the history of Latin literature. Surely, few other Greek poets can rival the impact of Sappho at Rome. This important fact calls out for a systematic approach to Sappho's Roman reception, which is the aim of Roman Receptions of Sappho that focuses on the poetry of the central period of Roman literary history, from the time of Lucretius to that of Martial.

H.D. & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism takes on the daring task of examining the connection between two queer women, one a poet and the other a historical novelist, living from the late 19th century through the 20th century. When they met in 1918, H.D. was a modernist poet, married to a shell-shocked adulterous poet, and pregnant by another man. She fell in love with Bryher, who was entrapped by her wealthy secretive family. Their bond grew over Greek poetry, geography, ancient history and literature, the telegraph, and telepathy. They felt their love-and their true identities existed invisibly- a giddy, and disturbing element to their relationship; they lived off and on in distant geographies, though in near continual contact. This book exposes why literary history has occluded this love story of the world wars and poetic modernism.