Every Woman I'Ve Ever Loved: Lesbian Writers on Their Mothers - Softcover

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9781573440301: Every Woman I'Ve Ever Loved: Lesbian Writers on Their Mothers

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573440302 ISBN 13: 9781573440301

Publisher: Cleis Pr, 1997

"I have wanted to find my mother in every woman I've ever loved," writes Catherine Reid in the introduction to this refreshingly complex and original anthology. "I have ached to find traces of her smell, her touch, the way she would cradle the back of my head, her songs. I had to turn forty before I could admit that to myself or acknowledge how often a similar yearning shows up in the people around me. Relationships with mothers are complicated for everyone - men and women, heterosexual, gay and bisexual. But for lesbians, that core relationship is especially powerful, blessed (or burdened) with a multiplicity of emotions and desires. In Every Woman I've Ever Loved, an impressive line-up of lesbian authors examines the mother/daughter relationship .... in essays, poems and dramatic monoloogues, and even one photo essay. As women who love women, these writers bring passionate intensity and complicated depths to this fundamental, first love. Dorothy Allison, Gloria Anzalda, Claudia Bepko, Meg Daly, Jyl Lynn Felman , Marilyn Hacker, Holly Hughes, Audre Lorde, Laura Markowitz, Jane Miller, Cherre Moraga, Joan Nestle, Linda Niemann, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mattie Richardson , Maureen Seaton, Mab Segrest, Shay Youngblood and others.

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Review:

In her introduction to this collection of essays, Catherine Reid suggests that the complications of mother-child relationships are more intensified and distilled for lesbians than for others, because both our own bodies and those of lovers can evoke the memory of mother. About half of the 28 essays in this book, by writers such as Audre Lorde, Joan Nestle, and Dorothy Allison, have been previously published; the other half were written for this anthology. Mab Segrest writes eloquently and sadly about her dead mother's relation to Segrest's writing and anti-racist activism. The excerpt from Holly Hughes's World Without End captures the giddy nervousness of a daughter seeing her mother naked. Shay Youngblood's spare vignette describes the affinity between a mother and daughter whose bodies are breaking. Every Woman I've Ever Loved is an extremely powerful collection, best read slowly with time for weeping.

From the Publisher:

Refreshingly complex look at the relationship between lesbians and their mothers.

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