a_muse_Janet_Mason_lesbian_poetry_ordering

When I Was Straight
"Part Adrienne Rich, part Holly Hughes, Janet Mason writes a kind of in-your-face feminist poetry that is both hilarious and sobering, political and silly."
--The Chiron Review
Insight To Riot Press, Philadelphia, PA, 35 pp., typeset, stapled,
$7 ISBN/Poetry 1-882827-06-6
Review
Read poems

a woman alone (click here to read and-- listen to--poems)
a woman alone poems/Janet Mason, Cycladic Press, 39 pp., typeset, stapled,
$6 ISBN/Poetry 1-882827-08-2827-08-2

"Just this morning I found out about a stunning poet named Janet Mason, from reading her book When I Was Straight."
--Robert Peters, interviewed in The James White Review

Why I read

To escape the tin cans and clip out coupons muttering in my mind;

To scale tree limbs and take great cloud bites of sky;

To shield myself from radioactive sitcomes emitted from teevee;

To see my face staring down from wordless constellations ablaze
in night sky;

To replace the brain cells I lost in the seventies with new and
better ones;

To lay naked next to Sappho, dipping my toes into her green
and garlanded sea;

To chat with Amy Lowell about our queer sister Emily as we sigh
and sigh into her red-cloaked hills;

To learn the ingredients of bombs and bake them into a cherry pie
that never lies;

To turn back the pages on the sun's fiery longing and find my own
tongue, burning.

The Dickinson House
(Amherst)

Under stern eyes,
the walls she called father
breathe
with years and feet
and passage

her quilt,
stitched pink
and green,
dipped candles,
paper on table top,
her words,
rhyme, riddle,
a slant of light,
stillness

the weight
of each room,
thumbs hooked in vest,
pocket watch
ticking.

When I Was Straight, click here.

author

Tea Leaves: a memoir of mothers and daughters by Janet Mason (Bella Books April 2012) is now available -- click here for more info

check out Janet Mason's author blog

read Janet Mason's latest piece in The Huffington Post --Chick-fil-A: What Would Gandhi Do If He Were Gay?