Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
They were women then My mama’s generation Husky of voice—stout of Step With fists as well as Hands How they battered down Doors And ironed Starched white Shirts How they led Armies Headragged generals Across mined Fields Booby-trapped Ditches To discover books Desks A place for us How they knew what we Must know Without knowing a page Of it Themselves.
I first read “Women” as a high school freshman, memorizing and reciting it for extra credit. Later on, it grew in significance for me when I read Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and learned that if not for Alice Walker, Hurston’s great body of work would probably have languished in obscurity for all time. Walker’s acknowledgment of the labor of her Black women foremothers in making her own life possible is a major theme throughout her body of work, and nowhere is it clearer than in today’s poem.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Make and be eaten, the poet says, Lie in the arms of nightlong fire, To celebrate the waking, wake. Burn in the daylong light; and praise Even the mother unappeased, Even the fathers of desire.
Blind go the days, but joy will see Agreements of music; they will wind The shaking of your dance; no more Will the ambiguous arm-waves spell Confusion of the blessing given.
Only and finally declare Among the purest shapes of grace The waking of the face of fire, The body of waking and the skill To make your body such a shape That all the eyes of hope shall stare.
That all the cries of fear shall know, Staring in their bird-pierced song; Lines of such penetration make That shall bind our loves at last. Then from the mountains of the lost, All the fantasies shall wake, Strong and real and speaking turn Wherever flickers your unreal.
And my strong ghosts shall fade and pass My love start fiery as grass Wherever burn my fantasies, Wherever burn my fantasies.
April 1955
Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) paved the way for and mentored many of the twentieth-century’s greatest writers, among them Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton, just to name a few. It is indeed a shame then that her own name has all but faded into obscurity, known only by a handful of milquetoast academics and the odd literature student lucky enough to come across her verse.
In both works, we see the personal melding with the political, illuminating the human costs of state-sponsored violence.
In addition to her poetry, Rukeyser was also a noted playwright, biographer, children’s book author, and liberal political activist. One can of a surety draw a direct line between Rukeyser’s poetics of resistance and anti-war sentiment in Theory of Flight (1935) all the way to Solmaz Sharif’s Look: Poems, which was composed using language found in a Defense Department dictionary. In both works, we see the personal melding with the political, illuminating the human costs of state-sponsored violence. In both works, lived experiences make the authors both participants and viewers in conflict(s) both interpersonal and global in scale.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
I’ve been revamping my socials to all have matching handles and this is my second attempt at #BookTok. The first one got a little bit of traction but I think I know what I’m doing a little bit better this time around. To accompany the video, though, I’m going to give you, my blog readers, a little something extra: a gallery of the book covers of the books featured in my #BookTok *and* a blog-exclusive quote graphic from each book that I won’t be posting anywhere else.
The Voracious Bibliophile’s 5 Books That Changed My Life “I don’t want to lose the boy with the bread.” – Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.” – Alice Walker, The Color Purple“To convey in any existing language how I miss you isn’t possible. It would be like blue trying to describe the ocean.” – Mary-Louise Parker, Dear Mr. You“How wild it was, to let it be.” – Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail “The moon sets and the eastern sky lightens, the hem of night pulling away, taking stars with it one by one until only two are left.” – Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
There’s a lot of pain, yes, but there’s also so much joy. The Color Purple is so radiant it practically glows in the dark.
The Color Purple is one of my favorite books of all time. Because there are so many books I want to read, there are only a few books I’ll reread; The Color Purple is one of them. I get more from it each time I read it. More than just a great novel, it is a blueprint for expressing love through careful attention, through putting oneself in a place of openness and willingness to accept the love we feel we don’t deserve. There’s a lot of pain, yes, but there’s also so much joy. The Color Purple is so radiant it practically glows in the dark.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart: Poems by Alice Walker
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Nothing will penetrate your sorrow. Or your loneliness. This I know. And yet here I am singing a song about doors at the bottom of dark wells stuffed already with rats and corpses.
Here I am telling you that in reality and as improbable as it may seem: There is no (doorless) bottom to this life.
Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism by Alice Walker
We are all substantially flawed, wounded, angry, hurt, here on Earth. But this human condition, so painful to us, and in some ways shameful – because we feel we are weak when the reality of ourselves is exposed – is made much more bearable when it is shared, face-to-face, in words that have expressive human eyes behind them.
The Voracious Bibliophile 