Introduction to This Crisis, These Blessings: Essays

This book is a series of experimental essays--painfully intimate lyrical memoir, factual poetry and emotional sensory political analysis. We need to read and write essays in order to consider unanswerable questions while also honouring our senses. Essays tell us what to think about. What is female identity? How should contemporary women deal with crisis? What shall we say is significant? How shall we live our lives?

What I have considered is: Women attempt goodness; there is no true feminine virtue.

Here you will meet a variety of women: a mother in a hospital waiting room, a rape victim, a murder victim, a Mexican maid, an ancient granny, a battered refugee, a pioneer, a lonely housewife, a drug addict, a wanderer, a 14th century Moor, a country bumpkin, an amputee singer, a bizarre writer, a newly pregnant woman, and a woman suffering illness - beautiful women all.

What I have considered is: Women are who we are—unfinished, ill, well, biologically and culturally diverse, erotic, gorgeous, good, ever changing. We should fly like angels.

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