In a series of "poignant, gut-wrenching, and above all, beautiful" (Booklist) prose poems, Linda Smukler searches for markings to guide her through the recreated life of her youth: wearing the gender identity of a boy, learning about shame, recognizing sexual abuse. Winner of a 1994 Astraea Foundation Emerging Lesbian Writers' Award.

by Dorothy Allison
Razor sharp, angry, and full of passion, Dorothy Allison stands her ground and refuses to leave any of the hard stuff behind. Whether writing about her dirt-poor Southern childhood, its brutalities and its love, or her lesbian lust--her outlaw sexuality--her poetry is cheeky, touching, and on target as she speaks the truth to the women she loves.

Toi Derricotte's Natural Birth "captures at length, and more than any other childbirth poem I know, the thing itself and not the myth," Alicia Ostriker wrote in her review of the book when it was first published in the early ' 80s.

The intervening two decades have not blunted the power of the author's language, her stunning ability to make the particularities of her experience as a young woman forced to give birth in the hostile environment of a "maternity home" resonate for a broad readership.

Now, almost twenty years after its publication--and thirty-eight years after the birth of her son--celebrated poet and memoirist Toi Derricotte revisits the writing of the book, the information she left out of the story the first time around, and her son's relationship to the circumstances of his birth, in a lengthy, moving introduction to this edition. With insightful candor, she explores the ways in which her confusion about love and sex and longing took away from the pleasures of pregnancy and motherhood.