Sisterhood [Paperback]

Poetry. LGBT Studies. If we ever forgot that sisterhood is powerful, Julie R. Enszer's poetry reminds us—with frank wit, grief, compassion, and a clear sense of the joy and burden of love. Enszer is a poet of the body, of family, of 'the sighs and bellows of the heart,' of music, of travel, of breast cancer, of the plague of AIDS, of black stockings worn to funerals. As the elegist of her lost sister, Enszer writes, 'She should be telling this story. / She was more descriptive than I.' As celebrant of the revolution that opened our society to the pleasures and realities of queerness, she writes of 'the look of defiance in our eyes' and remembers, 'Once we were the match / Once we were the flames.' SISTERHOOD gives off a good heat. —Alicia Ostriker