Selected for the Best Books List for June 2014 by Grace Cavalieri of the Washington Independent Review of BooksThe editor travelled for several decades throughout the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and Australia (with side trips to Finland, France, and Greece) to collect the rarest, most beautiful, most irresistible contemporary sonnets. The trip was fruitful. Among many colorful characters, the editor found Old Tom in the garden, a bull rider from the American West, God's secretary in His Office, the magician's bashful daughter, and Aunt Mim and Uncle Jimmy at the Rehab Lounge. Published by Headmistress Press on March 31, 2014, Irresistible Sonnets consists of 71 sonnets by 71 living poets. There are city poets, country poets, older poets, younger poets, 43 women poets, 28 men poets, rising poets, and poets laureate.

Irresistible Sonnets

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Headmistress Press

Each poem in this radiantly plainspoken collection offers subtle and penetrating observations that swell to a rich tapestry of ordinary life, beheld from a stance of grace and buoyancy. Starting with intimations of desire in childhood, these poems travel through ordinary domestic scenes to the blessing of a maturity in which the narrator, still embracing desire and wild promise, thrives in the midst of life’s darker gifts. This collection is truly a joy to read. It puts to shame those of us who walk through our days with “the din of loneliness,” ignoring life’s many invitations for bliss.

Joy Street

Foley, Laura

Poetry

Any art from a marginalized group is first dismissed as necessarily trivial or lesser because it doesn’t value the same ideals as the mainstream. It is only through iteration and resilience that the markers used to keep us out become the elements for which we are prized. That’s why a journal devoted to lesbian poetry and art is vital: it rejects tokenism; it makes visible the common themes between otherwise dissimilar writers and artists; and, most importantly, it shows the range and prowess of those who would otherwise be limited to one feature of their work.  —Eloise Stonborough, on Lavender Review at Ms.    Lavender Review, born on Gay Pride Day, 2010, is an international, biannual e-zine dedicated to poetry and art by, about, and for lesbians, including whatever might appeal to a lesbian readership. This is Lavender Review’s first foray into print, and represents a selection of poems from the first five years.   The 48 contributors to this anthology include renowned and new lesbian poets; translations of Marina Tsvetaeva, Renée Vivien, and Sappho; some poems from the past by Amy Lowell, Charlotte Mew, Sara Teasdale, and others; and a few lesbian-friendly poems by straight and gay poets.  ABOUT THE EDITOR  Poet Mary Meriam is the founder of Lavender Review, co-founder of Headmistress Press, editor of Irresistible Sonnets, and author of The Countess of Flatbroke, The Poet’s Zodiac, and The Lillian Trilogy (Word Hot, Conjuring My Leafy Muse, and Girlie Calendar). She contributes essays, reviews, and interviews to Ms. Magazine Blog and The Gay & Lesbian Review.  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER  Headmistress Press is an independent publisher of books of poetry by lesbians. As a small press, Headmistress is dedicated to honoring lesbian existence, discovering a range of lesbian voices, and promoting lesbian representation in the arts.

Lavender Review: Poems from the First Five Years

* Conjuring My Leafy Muse (Book 2) nominated for 2015 Poets' Prize * Girlie Calendar (Book 3) selected for 2016 ALA Over the Rainbow List “A poet can survive anything but a misprint,” wrote Oscar Wilde, flippantly intimating that poets are made half-mad by a world of trouble. One rootless poet lost in trouble, Mary Meriam, found an anchor in The Lillian Trilogy, which combines in one volume her three recently published poetry collections: Word Hot, Conjuring My Leafy Muse, and Girlie Calendar. The poems use a wide variety of poetic forms to capture and command relentless buckets of loss and heartache, revealing the untold horrors of her life and turning them around in a magnificent blossoming of longing, lust, sadness, and wit. This is very strong, fearless stuff, beautiful. —Rhina P. Espaillat Mary Meriam is a rare and original poet. This is a dazzling book, a fusion of anguish and wit and song, written in clear and compelling language. I love the wildness, the inventiveness, the always surprising but accurate metaphors. She writes of real things, real people, always musically. She uses Mother Goose rhythms and rhymes or echoes of Sapphic meters or settings as grim as any of the Grimm Brothers’ tales, to tell searing truths that move, frighten, and delight one with the skill of their telling. —Naomi Replansky Mary Meriam is a frightening poet, a frighteningly good poet. The intensity of her writing will frighten you, but also her technical skill. She can put a chill into the most common rhyme. The poems speak like “a gust of gorgeous / thundering swallows.” She identifies her models as Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Mew, whose Goblin Market and “Farmer’s Bride” rightfully haunt the collection. But her real soulmate is Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the ultimate poet of the queer and scary whose masterpiece, Death’s Jest Book, was left appropriately unfinished. She may ask us to “unspook” her dreams, but we won’t succeed. The uncanny is too engrained in her sensibility. All we can ask is that she continue to keep writing. —David Bergman Mary Meriam is a poet who takes risks, by which I don’t mean what you think I mean. There’s nothing risky about breaking rules that haven’t been in effect since 1880. I’m talking about the modern rules, the new respectability, the advice given in poetry workshops by legions of successful poets whom no one reads. Mary doesn’t give a shit about Pound’s “don’ts,” she’s too busy writing fierce, gorgeous poems about love and pain. She’s a true rebel, in all her heartfelt, singsong, vulnerable, girly glory. —Rose Kelleher Mary Meriam is an accomplished technician and imaginative Mother Goose artist, who like Mother Goose (my favorite collection in the world), is almost always serious, even tragic, along with fun. I am floored by poems with lines like the opening of “I Learn Today My Mother Lied”: “Not one drop of Jewish blood / in me or you!” my mother cried, / as if she had a drop to hide... We are lucky to have her dissident voice. —Willis Barnstone Mary Meriam’s formalist poems are compressed bliss, dreamlike couplets and velvet quatrains honed to a fabric delightfully carnal. Like two of her touchstones, Frost and Bishop, her masterful metrics are handmaidens to her message at play in the fields of passion, loss, and redemption. —J. Patrick Lewis This is my kind of a poet. ‘She speaks,’ as Larkin said of the beautiful and wistful and utterly different Stevie Smith, ‘with the authority of sadness.’ She also speaks in the language of tradition. She uses old forms fiercely. She is rather a fierce poet. Oh, and a Lesbian. You can’t ignore that. But what does she do? Do with words. Magic. Above all, Mary Meriam is a magic poet and if that is what you want (as I do) this is a book for you. —John Whitworth

The Lillian Trilogy

Meriam, Mary

Amy Lowell’s contemporaries, writing at a time when lesbians were invisible, described her as an old maid. But as Lillian Faderman argues, Lowell wrote “some of the most remarkable, barely encoded, lesbian poems since Sappho,” while living in a Boston marriage with her muse, Ada Dwyer Russell. Lady of the Moon offers a combination of three voices on the Boston marriage of Amy Lowell and Ada Dwyer Russell. The first part contains a selection of Lowell’s love poems to Ada. The second part contains a scholarly essay by Lillian Faderman that analyzes these poems in relation to Lowell’s life. The third part contains a 27-sonnet sequence by Mary Meriam which draws from the first two parts and supports the story with imaginative details. In this jewel of a volume, a great love is reanimated. Imagist Amy Lowell’s love poems to actress Ada Russell, pioneering lesbian-feminist scholar Lillian Faderman’s landmark essay on Lowell and Russell, and contemporary poet Mary Meriam’s heartfelt sonnet sequence speaking to Russell in Lowell’s voice, combine to create a remarkable erotic and poetic event. Like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Lowell and Russell had a great creative partnership that made an indelible mark on literary and lesbian history. Lowell called her “tense and urgent love” for Russell an “amethyst garden;” today’s readers will find gems of all colors in Lady of the Moon. —Lisa L. Moore, author of Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (Lambda Literary Award, 2012), and Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, The University of Texas at Austin What an erotic trinity! Amy Lowell’s fiery poems about Ada Dwyer Russell; Lillian Faderman’s illuminating essay about the couple and their “Boston marriage”; and Mary Meriam’s contemporary poems in Lowell’s lustful voice. Forget “Amygism” and “Patterns”: with this brilliantly edited selection of works by and about Amy Lowell, Mary Meriam restores Lowell to her rightful status as a groundbreaking feminist poet. —Julie Kane, National Poetry Series winner and recent Louisiana Poet Laureate Mary Meriam writes as Amy Lowell and her beloved Ada. She imagines, in a variety of sonnet forms, the richness that Lowell removed from her own love poems. While making use of Lowell’s language, the sonnets’ insistence on the psychological fullness of the two women and their relationship unsettles the century-old sounds so that a sense of quaint mimicry falls quickly by the wayside. The organization of the volume’s three parts is astute, though, finally, these sonnets cohere into a whole of their own. —Marcia Karp, poet and translator

Lady of the Moon

Lillian Faderman

Amy, Lowell

Mary Meriam

* Winner of the Headmistress Press Charlotte Mew Prize This collection is quiet in its transformations—both imagined and radically real—as the speaker allows us to understand different ways in which “love has gone and left [us].” The images that cypher throughout the manuscript—Blue Mosques, Persian seaweed, the song of the muezzin, goats left bleeding in the street—ally themselves with literary allusions from Millay and Dickinson to Zafon and Stein to create a new oeuvre of sound, voice, and color that is wholly the poet’s own making. At once melancholy and defiant, On Loving a Saudi Girl wakes some of the most difficult, buried truths of what it is to “love in silence, with deeds and not with words,” creating new ways for the reader to surrender again and again until surrender is made new. —Meg Day, Judge of the Charlotte Mew Prize Between East and West, both lovesick and at a loss, the innovative lyrics of Carina Yun’s On Loving a Saudi Girl pronounce what—for this poet—has been forbidden, dangerous. “The brittle Black Sea is more than I can bear,” the poet writes. Reading Yun’s poems is not a casual exercise. The work is rooted in necessity, the necessity to uncover a world where the many dimensions of love coexist. —Sally Keith Carina Yun’s debut chapbook, On Loving a Saudi Girl, is an enthralling sequence of intimate lyrics—gorgeous poems of love, longing, and loss. Interleaved among letters home, song-like addresses to Millay, Dickinson, and Stein, dreams and nightmares, we hear the rush of the Marmara Sea, the muzzein’s calls to prayer, the traffic and trams of urban Istanbul, and the clatter of hail on a Stockton street. Yun’s work pays rapt, word-wise attention to what living feels like. These are startling, memorable poems. —Jennifer Atkinson Carina Yun’s poems map a landscape where travel and a love of place merge with the loss of an erotic obsession. It’s a startling distillation of sensual experience—bodily, grieving, joyful. This is a wonderful debut. —Bruce Snider

On Loving a Saudi Girl

Yun, Carina

* Finalist for the Headmistress Press Charlotte Mew Prize Renée Vivien (née Pauline Mary Tarn, 1877-1909) was an English expatriate who made her home in Paris during the Belle Époque. In 1903, Vivien’s collection of translations and adaptations from the Ancient Greek poetry of Sappho became one of the first works of modern European lesbian literature to be published by a lesbian writer under her real name. This courageous act was the death-sentence of her literary career. Parisian critics who had praised the mysterious “R. Vivien” as a young man of poetic genius began to snub at first and then simply ignore the newly un-closeted woman poet. Even in the face of ridicule and disrespect, Vivien continued to write and publish poetry, short stories, translations, plays, epigrams, and a novel based on her real-life romances with Natalie Clifford Barney and the Baroness Hélène van Zuylen van Nyevelt van Haar (née Rothschild). Vivien’s poetry is now available in English translation by Samantha Pious: A Crown of Violets (Headmistress Press, 2015). I think it's very rare to encounter a new lesbian poet through translation and I am very excited to support this collection in its positive obsession and literary innovation alike. If it is that we are encouraged to each become the lover of Renée Vivien through her work, then this translator has succeeded in making the poet's wishes as transparent as an invitation can be: "The nave has been adorned to welcome you aright." Meg Day, Judge of the Charlotte Mew Prize This is an invaluable collection that brings Renée Vivien to life for English-speaking readers. Émigrée and sexual adventurer, Vivien wrote poetry strewn with broken harps and beautiful corpses. Pious’s delicate but fearless translations draw out the bruised passions and troubadour rhythms that make Vivien essential reading for anyone interested in lesbian literature, fin-de-siècle poetics, or the agonies of sensual love. Kate Thomas, author of Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal and Victorian Letters

A Crown of Violets

Vivien, Renée

These poems are lush, melodious, striking. Abe Louise Young isn't afraid to be brash, to be soft, to be big, to be the one to tell the queer kids to keep living. This is a potent and necessary collection. — Amy King, author of The Missing Museum (Tarpulin Sky Book Prize) and I Want to Make You Safe These poems by wise, wonderful Abe Louise Young really are heaven to me. As sensual as she is intellectual as she is gigantically celebratory as she is wary, funny, human, playful: Young allows none of these qualities to be sacrificed for the sake of any other. You’ll want to let these poems close, so close you feel on your face their “heavy / secret breathing.”  — Carrie Fountain, author of Burn Lake (National Poetry Series) and Instant Winner The poems in Heaven to Me find paradise in women’s bodies. Equally, they direct our delight to the body of each poem, to iambs and ampersands. Abe Louise Young’s voice is playful and reverent, and these poems of love and loss reward readers like the kiss of a priestess. — Lisa L. Moore, Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, and author of Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes

Heaven to Me

Young, Abe Louise

"I wish," writes Maureen Bocka in First name Barbie last name Doll, "I could tell you my history / Make you see past all the pink distractions." With apologies to Aqua, the Barbie girl's life in plastic isn't always so fantastic. These dazzling, clear-eyed poems deftly explore love, loss, betrayal, and inequality in a world where Dreamhouse closets are shut so tight, even President Barbie declares, "If it's ever known my friends and I / are lesbians we'll be incinerated for sure." Thank goodness Bocka is here to rip those pink doors open and report fearlessly on the secrets behind them. -T.A. Noonan, author of The Bone Folders, Petticoat Government, and four sparks fall

First name Barbie last name Doll

Bocka, Maureen

*Finalist for Lambda Literary Award! These poems are brilliant and dangerous. The opening poem, “Invisible Woman, Dancing,” is the best protest poem of the decade. The speaker attends a party full of casual, good-intentioned racists and ableists. The ending of the poem is explosive. Constance Merritt shows incredible range – erotic poems to a wayward lover; blues lyrics so rhythmic I can nearly hear the guitar; and devotional poems that offer “this, you know, is love, is all, the end.” Blind Girl Grunt is a major work by a major poet. —Jillian Weise Merritt’s latest collection is a back in bend—bend in love, bend in prayer, and bend in anger. A Blues infiltrates these lines and stanzas, ready to sing and stay (as any devoted lover) through the long haul. And the haul here is a woman, her myriad contents, in medias res. —CM Burroughs Beyond their shared—and dazzling—immunity to taboos, the poems in Constance Merritt’s fourth book are very different from each other. Different in form, from stern villanelles to get-drunk-on-them blues poems to wandering narratives. And they are different in their tones, with ruthless self-awareness next to sexy lullaby next to persuasive rage at being “unmoored and vanishing” beyond “the flag of whiteness.” Even within single poems, tone is protean. “The Less Than Greater Than Blues” is goofily playful and also as blunt as blunt gets about the roots of the suffering we cause each other. The penultimate poem “Advent” shifts between a longing that intends to wreck and a longing that intends to redeem. In fact the book as a whole shifts between these longings. As do we. Merritt implicates us gently but without hesitation, wrapping us into the “brilliant skin, the ruinous eyes,/ the body poised in transit” that opens the collection and that judges and blesses, throughout it. Blind Girl Grunt is supple, and rigorous, and so surprising. It is vital. —Taije Silverman

Blind Girl Grunt: The Selected Blues Lyrics and Other Poems

Merritt, Constance

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