Words for What Those Men Have Done (250) (Essential Poets series)

The poems in Words for What Those Men Have Done explore how the experience of surviving childhood sexual violence, coupled with the explicitly feminist commitment never to stand on the same side of sexual and gender politics as the men who violated me, has informed the way I choose to live my life. As such, the book is not a "survivor's memoir" in poetic form; it's goal is not arrive at a moment of transcendent healing, though there are moments of healing throughout the book. Rather, Words for What Those Men Have Done reveals what it feels like to hold myself accountable -- personally, politically, culturally, and socially -- in how I live my life as a man.