A Megaphone:  Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism

Juliana Spahr, ed.

Stephanie Young, ed.

Chain Links

403 pages

2011

Paperback

$27.95

A Megaphone is an anthology of responses to a fairly unlistening world, and heavily and admirably at patriarchy, with good reason.  It pushes at it with strength, conviction, resourcefulness, dedication, resolve.  But the positioning is not just an “at”—it knows and goes its own way, describing world-wide women’s movements, organizations, local actions, in the singular voices which become plural.  It is a glowing testimony.  It knows its anthological history.  It knows the unequal history of male and female publishing, for example.  It knows that there is strength in numbers, and sets out to give space to tens of feminists.  The title of the book is its own abstract.  There is no abstraction in the abstract, however.  This is about numbers, real numbers, to be counted, and for the countless to come forward to speak.  Poetry serves the Social world, and vice-versa, by means of its agencies, its activisms.  Here, though, it is not time to just bear witness—it’s time to act.  Megaphones are used at protest rallies and crime scenes for a reason:  to seek justice.