Description

Washing Windows Too contains 100 new poems, selected by co-editor Alan Hayes, by women who have not yet published a full collection. As co-editor Nuala O’Connor says in her introduction: “What a pleasure it is to see what subjects new poets love enough – feel urgently enough about – to be moved to create poetry.” The writers in the pages of Washing Windows Too have things on their minds that have exploded into that love-urgency that makes writers write. And, just as it should be, few subjects are off limits. A poet may not always love her inspirational material, but those here revere the act of writing so much – value it so much – that honing their ideas, visions, and insights into poem-shaped, concrete objects has become crucial.

In Washing Windows Too, particular groupings of motifs re-occur and these include birth and motherhood; child-love and empty nests; migration and refugees; women’s power and agency; bodies, the male gaze, and violence; nature and its beauties; art, creation, and the act of writing itself; uneasy relationships; politics; health and illness; and grief and death. And, because we are living in the early twenty-twenties, the pandemic naturally features in some poems.