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from my poem, gnostic disco girl

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uwmspeccoll

Staff Pick of the Week

My first pick as a staff member at UWM’s Special Collections is The Women Who Hate Me by Dorothy Allison (b. 1949), published by Long Haul Press in Brooklyn, 1983. This small, intimate book of poetry also features illustrations by Laurie McLaughlin.

Born in Greenville, South Carolina to a fifteen-year-old unwed mother, Allison grew up in a very poor, working-class family in the 1950s. Her burgeoning lesbian identity and strained/abusive relationship with her stepfather left her feeling ostracized and out of place. After attending Florida Presbyterian college and the New School of Social Research for anthropology, she found solace in a community of other feminists and eventually made a career for herself developing stories and poems often based on her experiences. She would receive mainstream recognition at the publishing at her 1992 novel, Bastard Out of Carolina.

What cannot be overlooked in Allison’s writing is her honesty and ability to lay everything bare; to articulate what is seen but never said, as gut-wrenching and brutal as it may be. With themes of sexual abuse, child abuse, class struggle, women, feminism, lesbianism, and family throughout, she dedicates this collection of poetry to “the women who hate me who made me angry enough to write these poems,” and “for the women who love me who read the poems and helped me pull all the pieces together.”

- Grant, Special Collections Undergraduate Intern

apoemaday

Rage

by Mary Oliver

You are the dark song of the morning; serious and slow, you shave, you dress, you descend the stairs in your public clothes and drive away, you become the wise and powerful one who makes all the days possible in the world. But you were also the red song in the night, stumbling through the house to the child’s bed, to the damp rose of her body, leaving your bitter taste. And forever those nights snarl the delicate machinery of the days. When the child’s mother smiles you see on her cheekbones a truth you will never confess; and you see how the child grows -- timidly, crouching in corners. Sometimes in the wide night you hear the most mournful cry, a ravished and terrible moment. In your dreams she’s a tree that will never come to leaf -- in your dreams she’s a watch you dropped on the dark stones till no one could gather the fragments -- in your dreams you have sullied and murdered, and dreams do not lie.