Twenty-five years of prize-winning poetry selected from CALYX Journal. This outstanding collection presents a diversity of poets who illuminate a poetic tradition in women’s literature that was submerged during much of the 20th-century. Here women’s voices pierce that obscurity with a fierce and dazzling brightness that is expansive, fertile, joyous, and powerful. Included among the more than 50 poets are: Julia Alvarez, Anna Akhmatova, Olga Broumas, Chitra Divakaruni, Marilyn Hacker, Barbara Kingsolver, Sharon Olds, Molly Peacock, Eleanor Wilner, Wislawa Szymborska, and Elizabeth Woody.
The Stream of It
They might say, a white bird in the snow,
And study it for years.
When the lacquer bucket breaks,
water is everywhere.
But water already is everywhere,
& salt; this much I understand
or hope.
The binding shadow, orange,
of an orange peel;
sky painted through the hip of a cow.
What the painters learn is a river,
eye to hand,
the color of earth & mind the same,
& its shadow.
Still it’s an unending struggle
to put it down,
even the best of them leaving
palettes like battlefields—
an unending struggle just to see what is,
when vision keeps breaking like water
across a stone, a constant rushing,
and light is a salmon,
always returning, blindly, to its source.
—Jane Hirshfield
"From here will come our literary heritage."—John Berry, Editor-in-chief, Library Journal
Margarita Donnelly is a founding editor of CALYX. She received the American Book Award for editing The Forbidden Stitch. She has co-edited four other anthologies for CALYX Books that include: Women and Aging, Florilegia, A Line of Cutting Women, and Bearing Witness/ Sobreviviendo. Beverly McFarland is Senior Editor of CALYX. Micki Reaman is Managing Editor of CALYX.
