Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives

About Leslie McGrath

Leslie McGrath is the author of Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage; Out From the Pleiades; Toward Anguish; and By the Windpipe. Winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and the Gretchen Warren Prize from the New England Poetry Club, McGrath has published widely, including in Agni, Poetry, The Academy of American Poets, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The Yale Review. She teaches creative writing at Central Connecticut State University and currently serves as judge for the Yeats Poetry Prize. She lives in Essex, CT, with her husband Bill Taylor, a shipwright.

Praise for Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives

Kickass and funny, daring and unabashed, Leslie McGrath’s Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives entices language to dance deep into the night.
—Annie Finch, author of Spells and Among the Goddesses

The poems in Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives resound with a fiercely lyrical force that propels a full range of human emotion—grief, joy anger, loss, ambivalence, love—through these poems like a stirring interior wind. Writing with an inherent sense of uncertainty’s ironic poetic strength, McGrath infuses her speakers with the Socratic conceit for wisdom, namely “being sure of very little.” “Let the gentleman/ in pleated khakis/ pressed for time// claim it,” she writes, “The certainty/ not the poem.” The evocative uncertainty that emanates from McGrath’s “negative capability” conjures hard-won truths with deft figurative leaps—“What have I become? Talking Mynah bird”—, heartbreaking conclusions—“Hell is furious daughters”—, and cold-eyed plain speech—“Once finished, we’ll flame out, God or no.” In an age of rampant subterfuge, false certainty, and a diminution of strong feminist voices, McGrath voice provides a welcome yawp that weds intensely personal narratives to the larger public theater of our daily lives in contemporary America.
—Chard deNiord, author of Interstate and The Double Truth

Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives takes a searching look back over the years since the so-called sexual revolution, the various waves of feminism, the civil rights movement, and the daily struggles of trying to live fully, justly, fairly, and with heart. Can it be done without heartbreak? No, says McGrath, but we’re not done yet. This is a book for fighters, thinkers, for those who want our days to accumulate into something of substance and beauty, in spite of our mistakes, and no matter what we face.
—Nancy White, author of Detour and Ask Again Later