Something has to die in order for us to begin to know our truths. Perhaps we have to lose our national fantasies. - Adrienne Rich

motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power. (from "Motherhood: The Contemporary Emergency and the Quantum Leap" 1978)

Reading The Second Sex in the 1950s isolation of an academic housewife had felt less dangerous than reading "The Myth of Vaginal Orgasm" or "Woman-identified Woman" in a world where I was in constant debate and discussion with women over every aspect of our lives that we could as yet name.

I think we're at a very interesting watershed, because I have been seeing and noting a tremendous renaissance of poetry in the United States over the past ten to twenty years nourished by the voices of many groups which had been largely silenced before that-by the voices of women, the voices of people of color, the voices of gay men and lesbians, the voices of working-class, white Americans. There is a seething, burgeoning poetry out there, but it's many poetries, and it's coming from many cultures and many communities.