Black Poetic Feminism

Sexual abuse happens. Domestic violence happens. We know it happens. We have child protective services. We watch Law and Order: SVU. We are surrounded by sex in our media, and we are surrounded by sexual violence in our media. Yet I have turned to the work of Toi Derricotte because we are not surrounded by sexual violence in our literary criticism, because we are not discussing sexual violence in our college classrooms, because the work of a poet like Derricotte, a poet who reveals the long, difficult trajectory of the emergence of voice, of the emergence of a healthy, vibrant, bisexual self, is largely ignored by those of us in the academy who contribute articles to that grand behemoth otherwise known as the Modern Language Association's International Bibliography. The Black poetic feminism of Toi Derricotte works on this silence in a variety of ways. Read on, and perhaps learn a great deal from her journey.