Speaking for my Self: Twelve Women Poets in their Seventies and Eighties

Poetry. Women's Studies. Contributors include Betty Buchsbaum, Phoebe Hoss, Nancy Kassell, Rita Brady Kiefer, Liane Ellison Norman, Margaret Randall, Myra Shapiro, Carole Stone, Florence Weinberger, Nellie Wong, Sondra Zeidenstein, and Geraldine Zetzel.

The poets in SPEAKING FOR MY SELF are twelve American women still writing and publishing poems in their seventies and eighties. Each poet in this volume is a "self," an individual, an accomplished poet. Each has a distinct voice as well as a commonality of experience among women who came up through the twenties, thirties, forties of the last century into the present. Each has willed her life into words. I chose these poems for the authenticity of voice each poet has found within her generation, for her courage to look life in the face, for her emotion, passion, conviction, for as much nakedness as she dares. I chose them for directness and clarity—because there is urgency in our communication. From the point of view of age and gender, we are the most underrepresented among published writers. I am determined to give a slice of the very silenced generation I belong to, another chance to be heard. This has been a mission of mine since I established Chicory Blue Press in the flush of the feminist movement.—Sondra Zeidenstein