S159. Arsenic Icing: Sentiment as Threat in Contemporary American Women's Poetry

Room 202A, Washington Convention Center, Level Two
Saturday, February 11, 2017
10:30 am to 11:45 am

 

Five contemporary female American poets explore how sentimentality is deployed in 21st-century women’s poetry, with regard to both content and rhetoric, as a means to counter traditional assumptions regarding female desire and identity. What personal and political alchemies occur when the affectionate address verges on acerbic? What transformations are sought when a female speaker, once familiar as mother, daughter, sister, wife, or lover, employs sentiment to reveal herself as Other?


Participants

Moderator:

Cate Marvin is a visiting professor at Colby College. Her most recent book of poems is Oracle.

Jennifer L. Knox is the author of four books of poems. Her work has appeared four times in the Best American Poetry series as well as in the The New Yorker, The New York Times, and American Poetry Review. She is the curator of the Iowa Bird of Mouth project and teaches at Iowa State University.

Erin Belieu is the author of four poetry collections, including Slant Six, chosen by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2014. Belieu directs Florida State University's creative writing program.

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of four poetry collections, most recently So Much Synth. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, the Nation, the New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 and she is an associate professor at Rutgers University–Newark.

Vievee Francis is the author of three poetry collections, Blue-Tail Fly, Horse in the Dark, and Forest Primeval. Her work has appeared in various venues including Best American Poetry and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry.

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