Lesbian

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series)

essays & speeches

An Emergence of Green

New to the Los Angeles area, leading a nomadic life of comfort and privilege, Paul and Carolyn Blake are an American success story. Paul is a self-made man who has overcome hardship to achieve a successful business career. Carolyn is the perfect young wife who has made him the envy of other men.

Then Val Hunter and her ten-year-old son move in next door. An artist just coming into her own, she is a startling and unconventional woman on all counts: physically imposing, and with a burgeoning independence of spirit--and a sexuality that breaks through in her passion for Carolyn.

Paul Blake knows a threat when he sees one, and he knows immediately that Val is exceedingly dangerous. She will expose Carolyn to values that will challenge what Carolyn has accepted and taken for granted. He must fight to retain possession of his wife, and fight he will.

An Emergence of Green is a timeless novel of no-holds-barred combat between a man and a woman for the body and soul of the woman they both covet.

This contemporary new edition of a cherished classic is a "powerful addition to gay literature, with characters of a depth and intensity not often found in today's world of disposable supermarket-rack books" (the Advocate).

Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About

Winner of the LAMBDA Book Award, Best Lesbian Anthology, and the Out/Write Vanguard Award, Best Pioneering Contribution to the Field of Gay/Lesbian Lifestyle and Literature, this best-selling anthology is the most important book ever published about Chicana lesbians.

Rave: Poems 1975-1999

The Choir

I walk and I rest while the eyes of my dead
look through my own, inaudible
hosannas greet
the panorama charged serene
and almost ultraviolet with so much witness.
Holy the sea, the palpitating membrane
divided into dazzling fields and whaledark by the sun.
Holy the dark, pierced by late revelers and dawnbirds,
the garbage truck suspended in shy light,
the oystershell and crushed clam of the driveway,
the dahlia pressed like lotus on its open palm.
Holy the handmade and created side by side,
the sapphire of their marriage,
green flies and shit in condums in the crabshell
rinsed by the buzzing tide.
Holy the light--
the poison ivy livid in its glare,
the gypsy moths festooning the pine barrens,
the mating monarch butterflies between the chic boutiques.
The mermaids handprint on the artificial reef. Holy the we,
cast in the mermaid's image, smooth crotch of mystery and scale,
inscrutable until divulged by god
and sex into its gender, every touch
a secret intercourse with angels as we walk
proffered and taken. Their great wings
batter the air, our retinas bloom silver spots like beacons.
Better than silicone or graphite flesh absorbs
the shock of the divine crash-landing.
I roll my eyes back, skylights brushed by plumage of detail,
the unrehearsed and minuscule, the anecdotal midnight
themes of the carbon sea where we are joined:
zinnia, tomato, garlic wreaths
crowning the compost heap.

Elegy

Somebody left the world last night, I felt it
so, last minute, last half-breath before the storm
that hit all night last night drew back. Midmorning
windows streaked with mud like sides of ears. How long

the journey? Sails, the windowpanes the black
thick tarp that kept the woodpile. Dry
Southern wind, in minutes clothes bone-hard, clamped
to the line. Clouds heaving in. The sky, the sky, who did arrive

to kiss the eye behind the windswept sheet? Who was it, solo
no longer, shy and desirous to be clean? What song
arose, what crust between the lids
spat and forgot? I woke, my fingers in my eyes

The Monkey's Mask (A Mask Noir Title)

From the pen of one of Australia's most innovative writers comes a totally unique experience. It's a crime thriller. It's where high art meets low life, passion meets betrayal, and poetry faces profanity on the streets of a harsh modern city... A lesbian detective novel in verse form.

Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

From Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter–a marvelous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry.

The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo’s “Love Misinterpreted” to Noël Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” from May Swenson’s “Symmetrical Companion” to Muriel Rukeyser’s “Looking at Each Other,” these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety.

Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde

Winner of the 2005 Lambda Literary Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award: the first and "essential" (Choice) biography of the author, poet, and American icon of womanhood, black arts, and survival.

During her lifetime, Audre Lorde (1934-1992), author of the landmark Cancer Journals, created a mythic identity for herself that retains its vitality to this day. Drawing from the private archives of the poet's estate and numerous interviews, Alexis De Veaux demystifies Lorde's iconic status, charting her conservative childhood in Harlem; her early marriage to a white, gay man with whom she had two children; her emergence as an outspoken black feminist lesbian; and her canonization as a seminal poet of American literature. 18 photographs.

Sappho - Poems, A New Version

This edition reintroduces Sappho to the modern reader, providing a vivid, contemporary translation, which captures the spareness and the intensity of Sappho's line. The wondrous Mary Barnard translation was based, unfortunately, on the 1928 Loeb edition by J.M. Edmonds, who filled in many of Sappho's fragment with his own Greek lines. In Professor Barnstone's brilliant translation, Sappho's work is presented as we have inherited it, in its darkly antiromantic idiom that rejects sentimentality and "prettiness."

Willis Barnstone is one of the most noted translators of today. Barnstone has translated numerous texts, including The Cosmic Fragments of Heraclitus, Greek Lyric Poetry, and a literary translation of the New Testament. He is also the author of New and Selected Poems (1997), Moonbook & Sunbook (1998) and other books of poetry.

Orphea Proud

HOT ICE

Taboo to the touch

A fire in the cold

That was us

Welcome to a stage, where a soaring painting takes shape before your eyes, a big-booty poet stands at the mike, and there’s a seat right in front, just for you.

This is a place where wise old ladies live and boys act like horses.

This is a vision of love that was crushed and brought back to life.

And this is my story. I’m Orphea Proud. Welcome to the show.

As Orphea, who discovers her sexuality as a lesbian, shares her story, powerful questions of family, prejudice, and identity are explored.


From the Hardcover edition.

Another Mother Tongue