Aphrodite’s Daughter: Poems

From villages in Crete to Carolina farms to San Francisco pavement, the women in these poems struggle to live by their own lights, despite pressure for them to serve as mere appendages to men. Aphrodite's Daughter tells stories of women in myth, history, art, and contemporary life. The goddess's daughter, fed up with her role in her mother's story, says to her: "i'm leaving—i'm walking out/of your myth finally—i need a mother not a love goddess. . . . " This volume springs from the sense that, as Adrienne Rich reminds us, under patriarchy women often feel "wildly unmothered."