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Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse

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An anthology of poems from women who proudly celebrate their own nastiness and that of other women who have served as nasty role models; poems by and about women defying limitations and lady-like expectations; women refusing to be "nice girls;" women embracing their inner bitch when the situation demands it; women being formidable and funny; women speaking to power and singing for the good of their souls; women being strong, sexy, strident, super-smart, and stupendous; women who want to encourage little girls to keep dreaming.

250 pages, Paperback

First published September 6, 2017

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About the author

Grace Bauer

20 books15 followers
A native of Pennsylvania, Grace Bauer has also lived in New Orleans, Montana, Massachusetts, Virginia, and now in Lincoln, NE, where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Profile Image for Teresa.
Author 8 books949 followers
July 2, 2018
This is excellent poetry, of many types, each poem different from one another, and all so brilliant. They are organized into sections: the inspiration of foremothers & role models; poems about mothers, daughters & growing up; on the body & self-image; sex, love & lust; bitches with bad attitudes; talking back to men; myths & legends; sisterhood; work; and, finally, social justice & political protest.

A special shout-out to the Louisiana poets included in this volume that I heard reading poetry on the day I bought the book: Stacey Balkun (hers here is a musing ode to Sally Ride), Gina Ferrara (a gorgeous poem about her aunt’s bra) and, one of the editors, the incomparable Julie Kane. The day of the reading Kane read two poems from this book, a hilarious one by Elizabeth Lara about an older woman going through airport security and the other written by the poet (A.E. Stallings) to her daughter about why she chose to name her Atalanta.

I started reading this the day I bought it, about a year after the inauguration of the man whose name-calling was the impetus for the title of the collection, a label women decided to own and wear proudly. I read one or two poems almost every night and finished last night, appropriately enough, as today is the day of another march, prompted by the same man’s name-calling—and worse. Though the motivation for this anthology was political, the name of the man who prompted it is not mentioned until near the end and in only two of the poems—his first name in one and his last in the other—rendering its impact that much more forceful.

*

Edited 7/1/18: Here's a video of several Nasty Women poets (most with connections to New Orleans) reading their poetry at the last Tennessee Williams Fest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8MSj... (Julie Kane and her co-editor Grace Bauer moderate and read their own poetry at the end.)
Profile Image for Jenna.
Author 11 books353 followers
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September 16, 2018
Edited 9/15/18 to add: I scripted the following write-up for a recent writers' conference panel centered on this anthology:

Nasty is a complicated word. Prior to its infamous use in one of the 2016 Presidential debates, the word made me think of something mean, often an animal, as in: “Watch out! That dog has a nasty temper.” Nasty has a connotation of toothiness, snarling, a long and flexible neck: a nasty-tempered dog is dangerous even when leashed. It is a mouth word, not a paw word. Even more frequently, though, I hear nasty used as a sort of verbal hazmat label to quarantine whatever causes revulsion, as in the phrase “What’s that nasty smell?” Things described as nasty often have to do with the human body: its odors, its whispered-about functions. The word also has an aura of sex, especially sexual kink. Whenever I hear the word, I think of the scene in the Muriel Spark novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie where a policewoman questions the young girl Jenny about a witnessed sex crime, asking, “Did you see something nasty?”, and Jenny and her friend Sandy later debate whether the officer, who had a Scottish accent, said “nasty” or “nesty.” Because of Spark’s novel, I mentally picture a bird’s nest whenever I hear the word nasty: woven twigs, maternal shelter. If two young girls in a novel playing with vowels can cause such a revolution in how I hear the word nasty, I am hopeful that an anthology full of woman poets can cause an even bigger revolution. After all, there is only a short distance between revulsion and revolt.


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I have a sonnet in this anthology, alongside work by poets ranging from Kim Addonizio to A.E. Stallings. It's a meatier book than I had anticipated, weighing in at 323 pages. There are noticeably more formalists represented here than in most non-form-specific anthologies, but plenty of free verse and prose poems, too. I was pleased, as well, to see more women of color and LGBTQ voices included in the mix than I had expected. I was also gratified to find many different varieties of womanhood represented: women who choose to be parents and women who choose not to be, women who work on farms and women who work in offices, women soldiers, women who thrill at shooting a gun, women who inwardly gripe picking up their kids from school.

In the Introduction, editors Grace Bauer and Julie Kane contextualize their project thusly: "We editors came of age...during the second wave of the Women's Movement, when the first women's poetry anthologies were appearing on the scene: Rising Tides (1973), No More Masks (1973), and We Become New (1973) among them.... [L]ittle did we suspect, more than four decades later, that the need for a women's poetry anthology would again become compelling." This latest women's poetry anthology consists of verse culled from over 500 international submissions received between November 9, 2016, and January 20, 2017 (dates whose significance I imagine most people who have been paying any attention to U.S. politics will recognize right away). The book is divided into themed sections covering the gamut of women's experiences: "On Foremothers & Role Models"; "On Mothers, Daughters, & Growing Up Girl"; "On Beauty, the Body, & Self-Image"; "On Sex, Love, & Lust"; "On Bad Attitudes"; "On Talking Back to Men"; "On Myths & Legends"; "On Sisterhood"; "On Work"; and "On Social Justice & Political Protest."

A sign that I might be a feminist poetry anthology junkie: I recognized one poem, Emily Rose Cole's "Leda Leaves Manhattan," from another feminist poetry anthology I've been in -- Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women .

A few poems that pleasantly surprised me and made me think: Amy Dryansky's "Merit Badge," a discomfitingly open-ended poem about how girls too often are rewarded for being accommodating rather than for sticking up for themselves ("[My merit badge] says, Most Improved, Congeniality, Goes Down / With the Ship. Says if you hurt me, I'll laugh. If you hurt me / harder, I'll laugh harder"); Sharon Dolin's "Unpairing: Proofreading My Marriage," a sustained performance of witty wordplay concerning a wedded union's disintegration ("Change Honor to...Your Honor. / Lover to...voleur. / Mattress to...Maîtresse"); and Amy Lemmon's "The Donald's Secret Clone," an elegantly understated political poem that imagines what the 45th U.S. President's not-so-identical twin might be like ("keeps his nose to the grindstone / and runs a tidy real estate operation / in Queens, growing it modestly to include the other boroughs").
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