With insight, humor, and uncompromising honesty, Nobody's Jackknife explores power and powerlessness, violence and tenderness, addiction and love. These poems refuse to separate the mundane from the profound: Rolling Rock beer, the racial coding of baseball players, and a melodic litany of yoga asanas intertwine in this brilliant and compelling collection. In 1960s Pittsburgh, a young girl finds her way to adulthood in a family dominated by a hard-drinking, blue-collar father, brothers who excel at baseball and machismo, and a pervasive but ultimately distant Catholicism. Her mother, unable to rescue her, offers two lifelines: reading and yoga. Using an astonishing array of poetic styles, Ellen McGrath Smith shows a rare gift for subtlety, an expansive intellect, and a sometimes brutal candor in this groundbreaking debut collection.

""This unique and powerful book is a must-read for any woman on a path of self-discovery and personal empowerment. Authored by seven leading female psychologists, Finding Your Voice is full of inspiring wisdom and practical tools and will give the reader thousands of dollars worth of therapy for the price of one book ""
-Barbara De Angelis, Ph.D.
author of Are You the One for Me?
Recognize and realize your true desires
Is your life what you want it to be? For most women, the answer is not really. Too often, we listen to everyone but ourselves when it comes to determining how our lives should be proceeding-and this prevents us from living the lives we really desire.
In this remarkable new book, a team of highly credentialed psychologists shows you how to overcome unproductive, blameful thoughts and unrealistic expectations-the things you tell yourself about how marriages, friendships, children, and careers should be. Each chapter lays out widely promoted images of a modern woman-the mother raising a perfect child and loving every minute of it, the top-of-her-game career woman, the woman who loves her body just as it is-then reveals how women more often beat themselves up with these ideals than achieve them. Finding Your Voice shows you how to use self-talk to sort through expectations, isolate your own voice, and take the necessary steps to meet your unique needs. You'll be happier and more confident, and you will live a more fulfilled life-the one you're entitled to.

One a lyric "confessional" poet and essayist, the other a jazz "spoken-word" performance artist, Adrienne Rich and Jayne Cortez were American feminist superheroes who produced extensive bodies of poetic work that reveal strangely overlapping visions, but in radically different voices and poetic styles. This book reconsiders the poetry activism of Cortez and Rich side-by-side, engaging poetics theory, cultural studies, and popular media in its literary analyses. A collection of eight integrated chapters by multiple poetry critics, as well as an artist-statement narrative by Wonder Woman sculptor Linda Stein, the book focuses upon the voice of bravado, the various calls for global justice, and Third Wave feminist "intersectional" critiques all embodied within these two women's poetic texts. The book also examines the twentieth-century figure of the American superhero, particularly Wonder Woman, bringing popular-culture studies into conversation with literary criticism, as well as visual art through the inclusion of Stein's commentary and illustrations. This beautiful and compelling book experiments with the festschrift concept by inviting multiple and competing disciplinary views on U.S. feminist poetics, women's art and aesthetics, racial and sexual identities, as well as politics and performance-all in tribute to the power of poetry by Cortez and Rich.

One a lyric "confessional" poet and essayist, the other a jazz "spoken-word" performance artist, Adrienne Rich and Jayne Cortez were American feminist superheroes who produced extensive bodies of poetic work that reveal strangely overlapping visions, but in radically different voices and poetic styles. This book reconsiders the poetry activism of Cortez and Rich side-by-side, engaging poetics theory, cultural studies, and popular media in its literary analyses. A collection of eight integrated chapters by multiple poetry critics, as well as an artist-statement narrative by Wonder Woman sculptor Linda Stein, the book focuses upon the voice of bravado, the various calls for global justice, and Third Wave feminist "intersectional" critiques all embodied within these two women's poetic texts. The book also examines the twentieth-century figure of the American superhero, particularly Wonder Woman, bringing popular-culture studies into conversation with literary criticism, as well as visual art through the inclusion of Stein's commentary and illustrations. This beautiful and compelling book experiments with the festschrift concept by inviting multiple and competing disciplinary views on U.S. feminist poetics, women's art and aesthetics, racial and sexual identities, as well as politics and performance-all in tribute to the power of poetry by Cortez and Rich.