Trickster Feminism

New from celebrated poet and performer Anne Waldman--a witty, visionary collection that meditates on gender, existence, passion, and protest

How do we investigate the psyche of our playful resistance to assumptions and norms through poetry? What mischief can we invoke as purveyors of a future feminism, its ambiguity, and power? In her new collection, Trickster Feminism, Anne Waldman looks to the imagination of mercurial possibility, to the spirits of the doorway and of crossroads, and to language that jolts the status quo of how one troubles gender and outwits and topples patriarchy. Waldman summons Tarot's Force Arcana, the Bible's Miriam, the passion of the suffragettes, and various messengers and heroines of historical, hermetic, and heretical stance. Melpomene, the muse of tragic poetry, is highlighted as an inspiration for dirge, prophecy, and imagination in action. Mythopoetics, shape shifting, quantum entanglement, chance operation, magic, and divination play inside the field of these poems. Tricksters turn many ways, as does poetry, and in Waldman's rendering, a female trickster's manipulation may be apocalyptic.

Anne Waldman is a celebrated poet, performer, professor, editor, and cultural activist. She is the author of more than forty-five books, including Gossamumur, Manatee/Humanity, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy, which won the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for poetry. The recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and the Before Columbus Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, Waldman makes her home in New York City and in Boulder, Colorado, where she is a distinguished professor of Creative Writing and Poetics and artistic director of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University.