(Cate Marvin, Vievee Francis, Jennifer Knox, Brenda Shaughnessy, Erin Belieu) 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?

Published Date: July 12, 2017