Julie R. Enszer

The Pinko Commie Dyke is a lesbian archetype, an imagined dyke superhero, a dastardly villain, and an amalgamation of all lesbians and contemporary queer women. This edition of The Pinko Commie Dyke features a beautifully illustrated cover with original artwork by Isabel Clare Paul as well as illustrations throughout the book highlighting images and scenes from the poems. Through Paul's extraordinary illustrations in conversation with Enszer's poems, the worlds of The Pinko Commie Dyke comes to life. This is a book to treasure-and by "treasure," we mean "work for the ultimate downfall of the racist, sexist, capitalist, heteropatriarchy."

Alicia Ostriker’s artistic and intellectual productions as a poet, critic, and essayist over the past 50 years are protean and have been profoundly influential to generations of readers, writers, and critics. In all her writings, both the feminist and the human engage fiercely with the material and metaphysical world. Ostriker is a poet concerned with questions of social justice, equality, religion, and how to live in a world marked by both beauty and tragedy. Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker engages Ostriker’s poetry from throughout her career, including her first volume Songs, her award-winning collection The Imaginary Lover, and her more recent work in the collections No Heaven, the volcano sequence, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, and Waiting for the Light. Like her literary criticism and essays, Ostriker’s poetry explores themes of feminism, Jewish life, family, and social justice. With insightful essays—some newly written for this collection—poets and literary critics including Toi Derricotte, Daisy Fried, Cynthia Hogue, Tony Hoagland, and Eleanor Wilner illuminate and open new pathways for critical engagement with Alicia Ostriker’s lifetime of poetic work.

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "If we ever forgot that sisterhood is powerful, Julie R. Enszer's poetry reminds us--with frank wit, grief, compassion, and a clear sense of the joy and burden of love. Enszer is a poet of the body, of family, of 'the sighs and bellows of the heart, ' of music, of travel, of breast cancer, of the plague of AIDS, of black stockings worn to funerals. As the elegist of her lost sister, Enszer writes, 'She should be telling this story. / She was more descriptive than I.' As celebrant of the revolution that opened our society to the pleasures and realities of queerness, she writes of 'the look of defiance in our eyes' and remembers, 'Once we were the match / Once we were the flames.' SISTERHOOD gives off a good heat."--Alicia Ostriker

"Great essayists give gifts of reflection, contemplation, and surprising revelations. Julie Enszer delivers essays like cool drinks of water, sipping on community building, home-making, coming out, sex, politics and change from 1994 to 2012. With a Midwestern lesbian point of view, Julie shows us who are, who we can be, and where we are going. Drink up her words and be refreshed for the journeys to freedom, liberation and social justice." Sue HydeAuthor, Come Out & Win

In this land of milk and honey, poems flow. Contemporary Jewish, lesbian poets address an array of experiences-- relationships between and among women, family relationships, politics, solitude, ethical responsibilities, history, solidarity, and community. Milk and Honey features beloved poets like Ellen Bass, Robin Becker, Elana Dykewomon, Marilyn Hacker, Eleanor Lerman, Joan Nestle, Lesl a Newman and Ellen Orleans, as well as new and emerging voices. With language and imagery that moves from the sensual and political to the tender and serene, Milk and Honey explores the vibrant, complicated, exhilarating experience of being Jewish and lesbian-- or queer-- in the world today.

In her first collection, Julie R. Enszer offers poems that are as unabashedly erotic as they are unabashedly feminist. Whether responding to queer cultural icons, fantasizing about sex, or mourning illness and loss, these poems are sweet and sultry, fierce and tender. From demonstrations on the streets to bedroom romps, these smart and sexy poems interweave narrative and lyrical moments with the political and the sensuous. Handmade Love renders a world that delights in the lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and tells queer life stories sublimely and generously.