Choice Words
Description
A landmark literary anthology of poems, stories, and essays, Choice Words collects essential voices that renew our courage in the struggle to defend reproductive rights. Twenty years in the making, the book spans continents and centuries. This collection magnifies the voices of people reclaiming the sole authorship of their abortion experiences. These essays, poems, and prose are a testament to the profound political power of defying shame.
Contributors include Ai, Amy Tan, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Camonghne Felix, Carol Muske-Dukes, Diane di Prima, Dorothy Parker, Gloria Naylor, Gloria Steinem, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jean Rhys, Joyce Carol Oates, Judith Arcana, Kathy Acker, Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Lindy West, Lucille Clifton, Mahogany L. Browne, Margaret Atwood, Molly Peacock, Ntozake Shange, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Sharon Doubiago, Sharon Olds, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Sholeh Wolpe, Ursula Le Guin, and Vi Khi Nao.
More details
Person
Annie Finch is an award-winning feminist poet, author of Spells: New and Selected Poems and Calendars, shortlisted for the Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Award. Her ritual drama on abortion, Among the Goddesses, received the Sarasvati Award in Poetry.
Content
- Intro
- COPYRIGHT
- CONTENTS
- FOREWORD
- INTRODUCTION
- MIND
- You Are Here
- First Response
- From The Women of Brewster Place
- Motherhood
- (Amber)
- From The Kitchen God's Wife
- The End
- A Million Women Are Your Mother
- "Oh Yeah, Because You Could Choose Not To," from Now for the North
- From The Millstone
- The Abortion I Didn't Want
- Free and Safe Abortion
- Merely by Wilderness
- From Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman
- Cora, Unashamed
- You Have No Name, No Grave, No Identity
- Five Months Vulnerable
- From Past Due
- Abortion
- From Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman
- The Pill Versus the Springfield Mine Disaster
- You Don't Know
- Ghazal
- From What Have You Done for Me Lately?
- Post-Abortion Questionnaire-Powered by SurveyMonkey
- BODY
- From "Tam Lin"
- The Business of Machines
- From Heat and Dust
- Psalm
- On the Death and Hacking into a Hundred Pieces of Nineteen-Year-Old Barbara Lofrumento by an Illegal Abortionist, 1962
- From Self-Ritual for Invoking Release of Spirit Life in the Womb
- And There Is This Edge
- Tugging
- From Happening
- Saraswati Praises Your Name Even When You Have No Choice
- "Recruiting New Counselors" from Jane: Abortion and the Underground
- From "Box Set"
- Birth
- The Scarlet A
- Sorry I'm Late
- Pelican
- Names of Exotic Gods and Children
- Date of Last Period
- Remembering How My Native American Grandfather Told Me a Pregnant Woman Had Swallowed Watermelon Seeds
- From "Make Your Own Way Home"
- An Avocado Is Going to Have an Abortion
- yolk (v.)
- This Doctor Speaks: Abortion Is Health Care
- In Which I Am a Volcano, from Terminations: One
- Cold Cuts and Conceptions
- My Excuse: I Had an Abortion. What's Yours?
- The Jewel of Tehran
- HEART
- the mother
- Places
- Women's Liberation
- Cardboard Pope
- From Granica (Boundary)
- Interred
- She Did Not Tell Her Mother (A Found Poem)
- The Lady with the Lamp
- From Rubyfruit Jungle
- From La Bâtarde
- I Am Used to Keeping Secrets about My Body
- Weather
- Of the Missing Fifty Million
- My Sister Grows Big and Small
- Tweets in Exile from Northern Ireland
- The Virginity Thief (A Letter to My Man)
- Abortion Hallucination
- Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, After an Abortion
- What Was, Still Is
- From "Abortion"
- Song of the Emmenagogues
- From The Hundred Secret Senses
- Nothing but the Wind
- Haint
- The Memory of Abortion Unexpectedly Returns
- Gretel: Unmothering
- Moo and Thrall
- From La Nove de los locos (The Ship of Fools)
- Abortion
- From Come in Spinner
- From "Standing Ground"
- Dear Elegy the Size of a Blueberry
- "Farewell, My Love," from The Sacrament of Abortion
- Afterlife
- WILL
- Through the Blood
- Right to Life
- From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
- The Spring of Life
- From for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf
- From "Introduction to 'The Idea' and 'The Idea'"
- Not Yours
- Being a Woman
- An Abortion Day Spell for Two Voices
- I Think She Was a She
- Regarding Choice
- We Women
- "Don Quixote's Abortion," from Don Quixote
- American Abortion Sonnet #7
- After the Abortion, an Older White Planned Parenthood Volunteer Asks If My Husband Is Here & Squeezes My Thigh and Says, "You Made The Right Decision," and Then "Look What Could Happen If Trump Were President, I Mean, You Might Not Even Be Here."
- New World Order
- From Daughter of Earth
- The Abortion
- Confession #1
- From Frog
- Getting into Trouble
- The Children's Crusade
- A Promise
- SPIRIT
- Poem for Myself and Mei: Concerning Abortion
- A Good Woman Would Never
- Abortion Isn't Beautiful
- Magdalen
- The Year the Law Changed
- I Bloomed
- From "Corona and Confession"
- The Promise
- From "A Healing Abortion Ceremony"
- A Birth Plan for Dying
- On That Day
- New Religion
- Hail Mary
- At Advent, the Waiting Room
- From A Book of American Martyrs
- Tunnel of Light
- Lizard
- Beneath the World: Two Poems to The Child Never to Be Born
- Prayer to the Spirit
- the lost baby poem
- Abortion Child
- "Fire Section" from Abortion: A Healing Ritual
- An Abortion
- From "Principles of Midwifery," from My Notorious Life
- Christmas Carols
- Nicolette
- From "Lily's Abortion in the Room of Statues" in Among the Goddesses
- Chapel of Forgiveness
- From Surfacing
- Mourning Sickness
- Lullaby
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- CREDITS FOR REPRINTED TEXTS
- CONTRIBUTORS
- TIMELINE OF PRE-TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY WORKS
- BACK COVER
