North American Women Poets in the 21st Century

North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language is an important new addition to the American Poets in the 21st Century series. Like the earlier anthologies, this volume includes generous selections of poetry by some of the best poets of our time as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays on their work. Among the insightful pieces included in this volume are essays by Catherine Cucinella on Marilyn Chin, Meg Tyler on Fanny Howe, Elline Lipkin on Alice Notley, Kamran Javadizadeh on Claudia Rankine, and many more. A companion web site will present audio of each poet's work. Calling, Natasha Trethewey Mexico 1969

Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions? I want to say

it begins like this: the trip a pilgrimage, my mother

kneeling at the altar of the Black Virgin,

enthralled--light streaming in

a window, the sun

at her back, holy water

in a bowl she must have touched. What's left is palimpsest--one memory

bleeding into another, overwriting it.

How else to explain what remains? The sound

of water in a basin I know is white, the sun behind her, light streaming in,

her face-- as if she were already dead--blurred

as it will become. I want to imagine her beforethe altar, rising to meet us, my father

lifting me toward her outstretched arms.

What else to make

of the mind's slick confabulations?

What comes back is the sun's dazzle on a pool's surface,

light filtered through water

closing over my head, my mother--her body between me and the high sun, a corona of light

around her face.

Why not call it a vision? What I know is this:

I was drowning and saw a dark Madonna;

someone pulled me through

the water's bright ceiling

and I rose, initiate,

from one life into another.