Sometimes all it takes is a little teaching to get the taste. That bit of teaching is what a new podcast called Poetry For All aims to achieve. In this podcast, which Van Engen co-hosts with Joanne Diaz, a poet and English professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, they introduce a great poem each week and why they love it. In fifteen minutes, they read the poem, discuss it, learn how it works, see what it has to teach, then read it one more time.
A heroic recovery of queer feminist literary history and criticism, Melanie Micir’s The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives celebrates women’s defiant literary and personal commitments in the face of ongoing erasure from the annals of modernism. Beautifully written, ferociously researched, energetically argued, this study documents, interprets, and theorizes a modernist genre out of the intimate, private biographical acts of lesbian and queer writers Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Hope Mirrlees, Alice B. Toklas, among others. Reading biography as an activist genre undertaken in late career by queer feminist writers, The Passion Projects discovers in unpublished, unfinished, curated, collated, forward-looking works by women the ghostly materials awaiting discovery in the future of this book.
