Femistry, 2nd Collection of Poems

Pamela Hughes’s second collection of poems, Femistry, is a chemical marriage of reactions and actions that honor the everyday and sacred lives of women, while simultaneously advocating for the redemption of the disrespected female body. These women-centric power poems are a kind of palimpsest rearing up and writing over the rutted, often deadly, narrative pathways of patriarchy. The pages pull us into lyric and narrative explorations that draw on mythological, historical and literary figures, such as Persephone, Athena, Hatshepsut, Wangarĩ Matthai, Emily Dickinson, Frida Kahlo, Gertrude Stein and The Fearless Girl, among others. Hughes’s poems are irreverent, sometimes funny and often fiery. She takes aim and lets her weapon of words fly to strike toxic masculinity, misogyny, domestic abuse and rape culture. Here, “softness is another kind of weapon.” She juxtaposes war and its vast sprawl of desolation—“a Thracian army of thousands,” “or a long line of a Roman legion pushing back horizons” and the diminutive—the regenerative power of the supple:

                                                                                    ,

                                                                                small
                                                                                things
                                                                                mean
                                                                                more
                                                                                    ,

The feminist narrative builds with each of her serious or seriously playful speakers—her bold array of women and girls at play, pray, prey, and protest—of women in nature that set a path towards awareness. Femistry is a startling collection that invites you to be part of the chemical reaction of “the jouled-room / the jeweled womb / the ways in which her properties interact, combine and change—a vibration of substances / breaking their bonds, with an exchange of atoms / solution concentration—/and the use of these processes / to form / new worlds.”

Femistry is Pamela Hughes’s 2nd collection of poems. Her first, Meadowland Take My Hand, was published in 2017 by Three Mile Harbor Press. Her poetry and prose have appeared in: Prairie Schooner; New Feather Anthology; Canary; Literary Mama; PANK Magazine; The Paterson Literary Review; Thema; The Red Wheelbarrow and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College and is the editor of the online literary magazine, Narrative Northeast. Please visit her at www.narrativenortheast.com

Purchase here at Three Mile Harbor Press: https://www.3mileharborpress.com/?page_id=5287

        Pamela and the Fearless Girl, Broadway, New York, photo by Trinity Hughes-Arciuch