The Cascadia Su bductio A LITERARY n Z QUARTERLY on July 2012 X Vol. 2. No. 3 e ESSAYS In Memoriam: Adrienne Rich by L. Timmel Duchamp Back at Day 1, Again by Abby Koenig IN THIS ISSUE POEMS adam by Kiik A.K. wedding in the uncut hair of the meadow by Kiik A.K. Most Beautiful in Death by Alex Dally MacFarlane BOOKS REVIEWED Grandmother Magma Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders by Samuel R. Delany Report from Planet Midnight by Nalo Hopkinson X The Killing Moon M by N.K. Jemisin eredith Scheff Scheff eredith Fountain of Age by Nancy Kress Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Science Fiction edited by Brit Mandelo X FEATURED ARTIST Meredith Scheff untitled $4.00 Managing Editor ol o uly Lew Gilchriist v . 2 N . 3—J 2012 Reviews Editor Essays Nisi Shawl In Memoriam: Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) h 3 Features Editor by L. Timmel Duchamp L. Timmel Duchamp Back at Day 1, Again h 6 by Abby Koenig Arts Editor Kath Wilham POEMS adam, by Kiik A.K. h 9 $4.00 wedding in the uncut hair of the meadow, by Kiik A.K. h 19 Most Beautiful in Death, by Alex Dally MacFarlane h 21 REviEws Grandmother Magma Nights at the Circus, by Angela Carter h 10 reviewed by Graham Joyce Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, by Samuel R. Delany h 12 reviewed by Victoria Garcia Report from Planet Midnight, by Nalo Hopkinson h 13 H reviewed by Thomas Foster h 2 The Killing Moon, by N.K. Jemisin 16 reviewed by Ebony Thomas Fountain of Age, stories by Nancy Kress h 17 reviewed by Cynthia Ward Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Science Fiction, edited by Brit Mandelo h 20 reviewed by Paige Clifton-Steele FEatuREd aRtist Meredith Scheff h 22 © The Cascadia Subduction Zone, 2012 Subscriptions and single issues online To order by check, payable to: at: www.thecsz.com Aqueduct Press Print subscription: $15/yr; P.O. Box 95787 Print single issue: $4 Seattle, WA 98145-2787 Electronic Subscription (PDF format): [Washington State Residents $10 per year add 9.5% sales tax.] Electronic single issue: $3 In This ISSUE Cover banner collagraph of the Cascadia subduction zone by Marilyn Liden Bode n y In Memoriam: Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) by L. Timmel Duchamp On March 27, the world lost poet, in 1997, declining the National Medal essayist, and theorist Adrienne Rich. of Arts, the United States government’s In my personal canon, Rich’s work rubs highest award bestowed upon artists, “I’ve gone again and shoulders with Joanna Russ’s. For most written to Jane Alexander, then chair- again to her poetry: not of my adult life I’ve gone again and again woman of the National Endowment for to be comforted, but to to her poetry: not to be comforted, but to the Arts, which administers the award. be slapped awake.” be slapped awake. True, I’ve often found Rich expressed her dismay, Fox writes, my life and myself in her poetry, but that amid the “increasingly brutal impact of act of finding has always marked the racial and economic injustice,” that the onset of interrogation both painful and government had chosen to honor “a few life-affirming. I need change, her poetry token artists while the people at large are insists to me — change in the world I live so dishonored. Art,” Rich added, “means in, change in my life, change in myself. nothing if it simply decorates the dinner Every time I’ve located myself within table of power which holds it hostage.” the unfolding, expansive images of her But the obituary also, unfortunately, poetry, I’ve understood that I could nev- asserts that Rich “accomplished in verse er turn back from the path I needed to what Betty Friedan, author of The Femi- break for myself without betraying the nine Mystique, did in prose.” I disagree, self I always found in her poetry. strenuously. Adrienne Rich’s work went The obituary the next day inThe so far beyond Betty Friedan’s vision that New York Times, by Margalit Fox, be- the very idea of reducing her “verse” to gan: “Adrienne Rich, a poet of tower- Friedan’s timid, limited accomplishment i ing reputation and towering rage, whose appalls me. To explain how wrong this work — distinguished by an unswerving is, I’d like to revisit Rich’s On Lies, Secret, 3 progressive vision and a dazzling, em- and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978, pathic ferocity — brought the oppression which blew open my thinking in 1981, of women and lesbians to the forefront when I first read it. of poetic discourse and kept it there for Awakening, re-vision, and compulso- nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at ry heterosexuality are concepts I particu- her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was larly associate with Rich, just as I do her 82.” The obituary notes, among other warnings to feminists against thinking distinctions, Rich’s McArthur grant in we can “transcend” the history of racism 1994 and the National Book Award in or our anger, or rid our lives of sexism 1974 for Diving into the Wreck. “Widely without restructuring every institution “Adrienne Rich’s work read, widely anthologized, widely inter- of daily and public life. Many of the es- went so far beyond Betty viewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich was says in this book remind me of how exu- Friedan’s vision that the for decades among the most influential berant and exciting a task was the project very idea of reducing her writers of the feminist movement and of re-visioning the past and the little bit ‘verse’ to Friedan’s timid, one of the best-known American public of literature by women then available limited accomplishment intellectuals. She wrote two dozen vol- to us in 1971 — seeing and reading it appalls me.” umes of poetry and more than a half- through the lens of feminism — and dis- dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold covering the then exhilaratingly strange, nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. rebellious novels, plays, essays, and po- W. Norton & Company, her publisher ems that had been “lost” in the shuffle since the mid-1960s.” Poetry selling that of male-dominated history. We’ve had well? Extraordinary for any poet, aston- that lens now for forty years and spend ishing for a feminist, lesbian poet. But the much time grumpily adjusting it and most interesting line in the obituary, for complaining about the naiveté and inad- me, is Fox’s quotation from Rich’s letter equacy of that early re-visioning. But re- Cont. on p. 4 n In Memoriam reading the essays in this book — looking establishment, and so Rich turned to her (cont. from p. 3) afresh at the work of Emily Dickinson, work for help in thinking about the is- Charlotte Bronte, Anne Hutchinson, sues of women and work — about “the and others — I recollect joy upon suc- relationship of women’s unpaid labor in ceeding joy at discovering that the past the home to the separation between ‘pri- we’d been taught, in which women were vate’ and ‘public’ spheres, of the woman’s passive, perhaps decorative, but largely body as commodity.” (211) Arendt, Rich “I recollect joy upon mute, drudging, and pregnant, was a lie. notes, “writes as if the work of Olive Sch- succeeding joy at Even the work we knew of read differ- reiner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma discovering that the ently. Women were and always had been Goldman, Jane Addams, to name only a past we’d been taught, in which women were part of those who made the world (for few writers, had never existed. The with- passive, perhaps good or ill), and finding their doings holding of women from participation in decorative, but largely would help create a new, different future the vita activa, the ‘common world,’ and mute, drudging, and from that we’d been socialized to take the connection of this with reproductivi- pregnant, was a lie. Even as inevitable. Uncovering that history as ty, is something from which she does not the work we knew of read well as sharing the excitement of wide- so much turn her eyes as stare straight differently.” spread rebellion confirmed what we’d though unseeing. This ‘great work’ is thus always secretly believed: we would not a kind of failure for which masculine suffer what our mothers had. ideology has no name, precisely because In “When We Dead Awaken: Writ- in terms of that ideology it is success- ing as Re-vision,” Rich speaks of her ful, at the expense of truths the ideol- own awakening in the late 1950s. After ogy considers irrelevant.” (212) “To read almost years of resisting, fiercely, iden- such a book,” Rich writes, “by a woman tifying herself as a female poet — she of large spirit and great erudition, can be had been taught, of course, that poetry painful, because it embodies the tragedy H should be “universal,” meaning, as she of a female mind nourished on male ide- says, “non-female” — and being unable ologies.” (212) 4 to say “I” in her poetry, she began to Back in 1981, when I first read those write, for the first time, about experienc- words, I felt pain because Arendt’s dis- ing herself as a woman. One section of avowal of the realities lived by most of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” con- her own sex felt like betrayal.