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| CONTENTS |
Anna Mendelssohn: “men act as if they own the poetic mind”
Adrienne Rich: “As a lesbian/feminist, my nerves and my flesh, as well as my intellect, tell me that the connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”
Hannah Gadsby: “There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”
Carson McCullers: “Love is the main generator of all good writing… Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.”
Andrea Dworkin: “For me, being a lesbian means. . . that I love, cherish, and respect women in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. This love of women is the soil in which my life is rooted. It is the soil of our common life together. My life grows out of this soil. In any other soil, I would die. In whatever ways I am strong, I am strong because of the power and passion of this nurturant love.”
Samantha Pious: “Sappho Is Dead.”
Virginia Woolf, from her essay, “The Leaning Tower”: “Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our way for ourselves. It is thus that English literature will survive this war and cross the gulf—if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and how to write, how to preserve and how to create.”
Joelle Taylor: “It’s an overwhelming feeling, and it goes back to that feeling of belonging I was talking about earlier. ‘Cause people like us, we don’t get things like this. It’s a really magnificent thing. It’s a really important moment for me, and for people like me, for women like me. So I’m very grateful to the judges, and to the TS Eliot prize, for making it possible.”
Kate Boomsma: “Me and my girl we got this relationship”