Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Rich, and the Feminist Superhero

One a lyric "confessional" poet and essayist, the other a jazz "spoken-word" performance artist, Adrienne Rich and Jayne Cortez were American feminist superheroes who produced extensive bodies of poetic work that reveal strangely overlapping visions, but in radically different voices and poetic styles. This book reconsiders the poetry activism of Cortez and Rich side-by-side, engaging poetics theory, cultural studies, and popular media in its literary analyses. A collection of eight integrated chapters by multiple poetry critics, as well as an artist-statement narrative by Wonder Woman sculptor Linda Stein, the book focuses upon the voice of bravado, the various calls for global justice, and Third Wave feminist "intersectional" critiques all embodied within these two women's poetic texts. The book also examines the twentieth-century figure of the American superhero, particularly Wonder Woman, bringing popular-culture studies into conversation with literary criticism, as well as visual art through the inclusion of Stein's commentary and illustrations. This beautiful and compelling book experiments with the festschrift concept by inviting multiple and competing disciplinary views on U.S. feminist poetics, women's art and aesthetics, racial and sexual identities, as well as politics and performance—all in tribute to the power of poetry by Cortez and Rich.

Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Rich, and the Feminist Superhero is at once moving tribute to two courageous women poets and brilliant argument for a redefinition of what constitutes “heroism” in relation to engaged and feminist poetics. As boldly conceived by editor Laura Hinton, this exceptional volume brings together for the first time these great contemporaries who crisscrossed the country but never met. The range of scholars included in Feminist Superhero is impressive, Linda Stein’s work the stunning center of gravity, and the essays—addressing not only aesthetics but also issues of gender, race and sexuality—are riveting. This anthology should be de rigueur reading for anyone who has dared, thanks to the inspiring poetry of Cortez and Rich, to dream of a common language., Wonder women move among us in the work-a-day world, without capes, with no magic bracelets, quietly or loudly changing our ways. Jayne Cortez and Adrienne Rich were real people; we knew them. Starting at opposite ends of our continent, at nearly polar opposites on our aesthetic spectrum, they came together in their ambitions for our art and for our nation. As in this book, they came together in their readers, bringing us to ourselves as wondering beings. Laura Hinton has here convened a critical Justice League, more capacious than the original, and more just., The unexpected application of feminist superheroes to poetry and poetics permits a surprising intersection of scholars and critical approaches that will revise perspectives of these important poets for years.

Laura Hinton is professor of English at the City College of New York (CUNY).