The Chant Of The Women Of Magdalena And The Magdalena Poems

"The Chant of the Women of Magdalena and the Magdalena Poems form the lyric narrative tale of thirty-two women of every race and ethnicity who escape an English jail, commandeer a whaling ship, sail to a mountain home, and set up a society of artists and common women only to be nearly disfranchised by a band of roving sailors. The time: 1649. The place: the world as we know it today. The question: what is the moral, spiritual, and practical nature of woman in a world without man?" -- from back cover.

“Gorgeous, ferocious, lacerating, sexy, and profoundly compassionate.”—Michael Cunningham Magdalene imagines the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as a woman who embodies the spiritual and sensual, alive in a contemporary landscape—hailing a cab, raising a child, listening to news on the radio. Between facing the traumas of her past and navigating daily life, the narrator of Magdalene yearns for the guidance of her spiritual teacher, a Christ figure, whose death she continues to grieve. Erotic, spirited, and searching for meaning, she is a woman striving to be the subject of her own life, fully human and alive to the sacred in the mortal world.

Winner, Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Anthology Winner, Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, Publishing Triangle Awards A Ms. magazine, Refinery29, and Lambda Literary Most Anticipated Read of 2021 A groundbreaking collection tracing the history of intellectual thought by Black Lesbian writers, in the tradition of The New Press's perennial seller Words of Fire African American lesbian writers and theorists have made extraordinary contributions to feminist theory, activism, and writing. Mouths of Rain, the companion anthology to Beverly Guy-Sheftall's classic Words of Fire, traces the long history of intellectual thought produced by Black Lesbian writers, spanning the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. Using “Black Lesbian” as a capacious signifier, Mouths of Rain includes writing by Black women who have shared intimate and loving relationships with other women, as well as Black women who see bonding as mutual, Black women who have self-identified as lesbian, Black women who have written about Black Lesbians, and Black women who theorize about and see the word lesbian as a political descriptor that disrupts and critiques capitalism, heterosexism, and heteropatriarchy. Taking its title from a poem by Audre Lorde, Mouths of Rain addresses pervasive issues such as misogynoir and anti-blackness while also attending to love, romance, “coming out,” and the erotic. Contributors include: Barbara Smith Beverly Smith Bettina Love Dionne Brand Cheryl Clarke Cathy J. Cohen Angelina Weld Grimke Alexis Pauline Gumbs Audre Lorde Dawn Lundy Martin Pauli Murray Michelle Parkerson Mecca Jamilah Sullivan Alice Walker Jewelle Gomez

A considerable collection of German women's poetry in translation, results of ingenious archival research.

Love is actually a being that lives through us and many dimensions, the most ancient traveler of all. Magdalene was inhabited by it, as was her sometime teacher, sometime disciple Jesus the Christ. Together they, perhaps more than anyone else, embodied the will of love through death, incarnations and movement through the solar abyss. They left a message for us, a portal, a passageway through which we can all travel. Join them and be partly human, partly divine, taste god in all its permutations and be transformed in the luminous mystery of their experience. This is not a scientific treatise or a brief respite in the flight from body to body. It is a call of awakening into the bright memory we all share. Come, dare this lyrical blasphemy.