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Staff Pick of the Week

My first pick as a staff member at UWM’s Special Collections is The Women Who Hate Me by Dorothy Allison (b. 1949), published by Long Haul Press in Brooklyn, 1983. This small, intimate book of poetry also features illustrations by Laurie McLaughlin.

Born in Greenville, South Carolina to a fifteen-year-old unwed mother, Allison grew up in a very poor, working-class family in the 1950s. Her burgeoning lesbian identity and strained/abusive relationship with her stepfather left her feeling ostracized and out of place. After attending Florida Presbyterian college and the New School of Social Research for anthropology, she found solace in a community of other feminists and eventually made a career for herself developing stories and poems often based on her experiences. She would receive mainstream recognition at the publishing at her 1992 novel, Bastard Out of Carolina.

What cannot be overlooked in Allison’s writing is her honesty and ability to lay everything bare; to articulate what is seen but never said, as gut-wrenching and brutal as it may be. With themes of sexual abuse, child abuse, class struggle, women, feminism, lesbianism, and family throughout, she dedicates this collection of poetry to “the women who hate me who made me angry enough to write these poems,” and “for the women who love me who read the poems and helped me pull all the pieces together.”

- Grant, Special Collections Undergraduate Intern 

you can kinda tell who in the fandom is American or at least not European based on if they literally can not compute the possibility of a loving but not romantic or sexual brief kiss on lips between dear friends like jeez y’all can be in your feelings fine but imo the moment successfully both expressed sincere care and sorrow in a fraught episode AND provided a distracting excuse to get very close it wasn’t meaningless to have a brush of lips instead of a hug and truly moved me, and I fully am not blind aka a fan of the tension between galadriel and sauron who is pulling for idk what but something changed and sexy between them soon

Joan Baez photographed by David Redfern.

I-80 highway through Wyoming. nicknamed The Sisters, for the three sets of hills that create an optical illusion of the road rising into the sky

blue eyeshadow

Isabelle Huppert par Dominique Issermann, 1980

Diane di Prima

Masao Yamamoto

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