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It is simply not possible for a female poet to claim, like Whitman, that she intends to ‘go by the bank of the wood and become undisguised and naked’ without immediately becoming vulnerable to the male gaze. It is, in fact, very difficult for female poets to speak of their embodied experience without being misread as positioning themselves as erotic objects.
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I tell my sisters: / cultivate loneliness / like you might care for / an orchid, turning it / gently towards the light, / serving it water like wine / aerated, purified, filtered.
”
― Glimmerglass Girl
― Glimmerglass Girl
