Bøger af Judith Arcana

Winner, 2015 Turtle Island Editor's Choice Chapbook Award.According to Jennifer Richter, author of the poetry collections Threshold and No Acute Distress, "Here From Somewhere Else, Judith Arcana's gorgeous new collection, has movement at its core. Many of these poems are fueled by questions-questions that generate a powerful urgency and contribute to the book's compelling internal momentum. A curious voice and generous heart guide us through Arcana's geographical and emotional landscapes; I was delighted but not surprised that here, love gets the very last word."

"Dear Judith Arcana Not only do I like your book, I love it. Could there ever be a collection more endearing? Great wit, music, and pacing. Vivid passionate hungers, all stitched through the nubby fabric of aging with gorgeous shining threads. We can wrap ourselves right up in these poems for courage and verve.Sincerely yours, Naomi Shihab Nye"Announcements from the Planetarium examines aging and changing, wisdom and memory, and includes poems from Arcana's Mixtape Series and her Speculative Music Theory quartet.According to Judith Vollmer, "Judith Arcana's poems [are] both familiar and refreshingly strange .... jagged elegies on 'time available' and 'the short version, ' dazzling crows, lonely streets, and mournful seers, with a hyper-realist eye on the past. Wisdom-riffs earned (wryly) 'perhaps as compensation' counterpoint her portraits of loss: of land, water, and the 'grandmothers [who]/could move like flowers' yet who, "When we came here, [...] would not come." And then: she slips away to an urgent world of 'wind, shining like the flash inside/my skull-' [to] revere and celebrate freedom ...."

A compelling story of one woman's work with Jane, Chicago's pre-Roe underground abortion service. The narrator explores the nuance of how we remember and the mysteries of memory itself as she recalls the time the Chicago Police busted the service.

¿"It's a passionate rush of language, hope in a hard time, truth in the middle of lies. This poetry sparks and burns with the hidden language and stories of women" -Minnie Bruce PrattJudith Arcana, a reproductive rights activist formerly involved in Chicago's pre-Roe v. Wade underground abortion service, imbues her poetry, fiction and essays with the same ferocity, humor and passion that informs her activism. As Grace Paley wrote, "What I love about this important book is how the work Judith began in Chicago years ago has deepened in poetry and prose with love for the lives of women."In light of the leaked 2022 decision regarding Roe, it's more important than ever that we examine and promote reproductive rights and justice. Judith has been a tireless fighter on this front for decades. Hello. This is Jane. was published on the 48th anniversary of her 1972 arrest as one of the "Abortion 7," which directly inspired the pieces in the collection. Hard to believe that 50 years later, we're now in danger of losing the progress she and so many others fought so hard for. Previously Judith tackled the topics in poetry, with What if your mother, first released in 2005. Note that this 2nd edition of the book includes an updated preface."The title poem ... should be made into a poster and pinned up on the wall in every clinic in the United States." -Peter Bours, MD, longtime abortion provider

Before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the U.S. in 1973, the Abortion Counseling Services of Women's Liberation was a group of over one hundred women in Chicago who each anonymously answered to "Jane." When the group started in 1969, even providing information about abortion was a criminal act. Still, abortions were being sought and performed--and many people died as a result of the black market conditions of a procedure gone awry. Jane's role was to refer pregnant people to honest, safe, and reliable doctors and to provide them with empowering information, options, and agency in their own healthcare. And later, to learn to perform these abortions themselves and teach agency.

"Judith Arcana's remarkable feat in Hello. This is Jane. is to paint, tile by tile, a complex mosaic of compelling linked stories- children's playgrounds and adult tattoo parlors, ill-advised lovers and underground abortion activists. In the mainstream and on the edges, you'll feel the urgency of the struggle for reproductive justice as you turn these pages." -Cindy Cooper, Founding Director of Words of Choice and The Reproductive Freedom Festival, Judith Arcana has taught and written about motherhood and reproductive justice for decades. The prose and poetry of Our Mothers' Daughters, Every Mother's Son, and What if your mother are feminist classics. The stories in this new collection, rooted in her experience as a Jane in Chicago's pre-Roe v. Wade underground abortion service, were written as the United States has moved relentlessly into constraining motherhood and denying reproductive justice. By necessity, these stories reach from the past into the future, offering history and hope. "I'm profoundly grateful to Judith Arcana for writing these vital, electrifying stories. With abortion rights in America being stripped away-state by state, clinic by clinic-we need to hear from those who've fought this battle before. Arcana is a Jane; her work in the pre-Roe abortion underground has provide the seeds for her fiction, stories rooted in essential history to spark action in our terrifying present." -Leni Zumas, Author of Red Clocks