Search results for ""Silver Press""

Who decides what happens after sex? The last decade has seen a rise in activism and arguments over women’s reproductive freedom reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s. Political progress in Ireland has been countered by regressive action in the US. AFTER SEX provides personal and political perspectives from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, setting feminist classics alongside contemporary accounts and highlighting the experiences of women of colour and working-class women. These essays, short stories and poems trace past understandings of reproductive freedom and consider what it might look like in future, making urgent connections between women’s equality and access to contraception, healthcare and childcare.The writers pay special attention to people — both fictional and real — who have sought control over their sexual lives, and the joy, comedy, difficulties and disappointments that entails. But above all, AFTER SEX testifies to the power of great writing to show us why that freedom is worth pursuing — without shame and without apology.

Read more less

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Read more less

Ursula K. Le Guin witnessed and contributed to many of the twentieth century’s rebellions and upheavals, including women’s liberation, the Civil Rights movement and US anti-war and environmental activism. Spanning fifty years of her life and work, Space Crone brings together Le Guin’s writings on feminism and gender for the first time, offering new insights into her imaginative, multispecies feminist consciousness: from its roots in deep ecology and philosophies of non-violence to her self-education about racism and her writing on motherhood and ageing.

Read more less

Your Silence Will Not Protect You collects the essential essays and poems of Audre Lorde for the first time, including the classic ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’. A trailblazer in intersectional feminism, Lorde’s luminous writings have inspired a new generation of thinkers and writers charged by the Black Lives Matter movement. Her lyrical and incisive prose takes on sexism, racism, homophobia, and class; reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope that remain ever-more trenchant today. Also a celebrated poet, Lorde was New York State Poet Laureate until her death; her poetry and prose together produced an aphoristic and incomparably quotable style, as evidenced by her constant presence on many Women’s Marches against Trump across the world. This beautiful edition honours the ways in which Lorde’s work resonates more than ever thirty years after they were first published.

Read more less

By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state apparatus, Revolutionary Letters is a modern classic, as relevant today as it was at its inception, 50 years ago. During the tumult of 1968, Beat poet Diane di Prima began writing her ‘letters’, poems filled with a potent blend of utopian anarchism and Zen-tinged ecological awareness that were circulated via underground newspapers and stapled pamphlets. First published in 1971 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights in the US, di Prima would go on to publish four subsequent editions, expanding the collection each time. During the last years of her life, di Prima got to work on the final iteration of this lifelong project, collecting all of her previously published ‘letters’ and adding the new work, poems written from 2007 up to the time of her death in October 2020.

Read more less

A debutante frees a hyena from the zoo so that it might take her place at her coming-out ball; an artist paints a portrait of a man s dead wife, but finds she has painted herself instead; a woman makes love to a boar underneath a mountain of cats; a chicken is roasted with the brains and livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve and drops of divine liqueur; two noble sisters wonder whether anybody can be a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense ; a psychoanalyst must decide what to do with the gift of a team of Russian rats trained to operate on humans. In this first complete edition of Leonora Carrington's short stories, written throughout her life from her early years in Surrealist Paris to her late period in Dirty War-era Mexico City, the world is by turns subversive, funny, sly, wise and disarming.

Read more less

In the 1970s, microbiologist Lynn Margulis and atmospheric chemist James Lovelock developed the Gaia theory, which describes a living Earth: a body in the form of a planet. Fusing science, mathematics, philosophy, ecology and mythology, Gaia and Philosophy, with a new introduction by Dorion Sagan, challenges Western anthropocentrism to propose a symbiotic planet.

Read more less

In response to the anti-war movements of the 1960s, pioneering musician and composer Pauline Oliveros began to experiment with meditation, movement and activism in her compositions. Quantum Listening is her manifesto for listening as activism.

Read more less

In 1964, Nell Dunn spoke to nine of her friends over a bottle of wine about men, sex, work, money, babies, freedom and love. Novelist Edna O'Brien remembers being 'very frightened' of having her nipples touched. The Pop Artist Pauline Boty says she got married to the 'first man I could talk very freely to'. Kathy Collier, who Dunn worked with in a Battersea sweet factory, confesses that she had thought about suicide. After more than forty years out of print, Talking to Women is still as sparkling, honest, profound, funny and wise as when it was first published. With a new afterword by Nell Dunn.

Read more less

Humanity has always excluded Others on the basis of race and gender. What happens to people who choose to flee, following in the footsteps of those who resisted enslavement?This audacious manifesto draws on the legacies of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and others to consider the ways in which Black women have been excluded from, struggled to achieve and opted to reject the category of ‘human’. Sociologist Akwugo Emejulu argues that it is only through embracing the status of the ‘fugitive’ that Black women can determine their own liberation. Fugitive Feminism is a call for the collective process of speculative dialogue and a bold new model for action.

Read more less

In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson vs Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves— Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten. ‘Zong! is not just a book of poetry; it is a method displaying itself like a deep-sea creature that blossoms in search of food: the instant when ‘the material and nonmaterial come together in unexpected ways’, allowing the erased story of the slave ship to recompose itself in us.’ Cecilia Vicuña

Read more less