culture & reviews

Stealing Moments for Poetry

Summer/Autumn 1998

Nellie Wong is a citizen of the world. An off-hand comment by her boss, a skin irritation, a homeless person on the street, the smell of food cooking or tanks in Tiananmen Square . . . all these scenes from working class life are her inspirations. Her work is complex, evocative and rich with imagery.

Positively Angry

Summer 1992/1993

Positive Women: Voices of Women Living with AIDS edited by Andrea Rudd and Darien Taylor, Second Story Press, Canada 1992, 269 pages This is not a feminist book. Or at… Read more »

Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, New York, Free Press (1988). 326 pages.

Summer/Autumn 1990

Dworkin offers no hope for women. She identifies “contextual reforms” and political programs, only to dismiss them as off-base and futile. So, she indiscriminately lumps together demands for economic equity or rape laws that work with calls for electing women to political office and athletic excellence, condemning them all for failing to “address the question of whether intercourse itself can be an expression of sexual equality.”

Footplate Classics

Summer 1988/1989

I am a lesbian feminist. Between 1979 and 1984 I worked as a locomotive assistant training to be a train driver for the  Victorian Railways in Australia. At one time six women were training at South Dynon Loco and four women in country areas. Dianne Brown became qualified as a train driver in 1985. Unfortunately the other women left. The attitudes of many of the men working in the railways added to on the job pressure. I have put some of these attitudes into poetic form.

STRIKING WHILE THE IRON’S HOT

Summer 1988/1989

Forget the superficial       forget it forget the words that lack meaning the senseless acts     which pervert logic the choices we make     which defeat… Read more »

PLASTIC BULLETS

Summer 1988/1989

Emma Groves… What’s Emma Groves got to do with plastic bullets? Emma Groves pickets outside Astra Astra Pyrotechnic, in Regent Street, London assembles the plastic bullets assembles the plastic bullets… Read more »