The Color of the Heart: Writing from Struggle & Change 1959-1990 - Softcover

Sherman, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0915306905 ISBN 13: 9780915306909

Publisher: Curbstone Books, 1995

Synopsis

The Color of the Heart gives an eyewitness account of the controversies of the last three decades over feminist, political, and literary issues as only a poet and political activist totally engaged in the events could perceive and write about them—highlighting sexuality, gay liberation, psychoanalysis, and the impact of deconstruction on both politics and art.

About this title

About the Author

Poet, playwright, and founding editor of IKON magazine, SUSAN SHERMAN has published seven collections of poetry, a translation (Shango de Ima, Doubleday), The Color of the Heart (Curbstone Press), and a memoir, America's Child. Sherman was the recipient of a NYFA fellowship in Creative Nonfiction Literature, a Puffin Foundation Grant, and a residency at Blue Mountain Center.

Reviews

Previously published in a variety of periodicals, these essays, poems and short fictions by the editor of Ikon magazine remain crisp as an examination of feminist, political and literary topics of the last three decades. Sherman evenhandedly analyzes the implications of the controversial case of Weatherman Jane Alpert, who was accused by many women on the left of being an FBI informer. In a series of incisive essays, Sherman reports on the progress of revolutionary change, from the political participation of women to improvements in the standard of living, in Cuba and Nicaragua. Most affecting are her autobiographical stories and prose poems: her moody voice leads the reader from her student days at Berkeley and the throes of her intellectual and sexual awakening to the middle-aged years in New York, coming to terms with failure and mortality. The success of the poetry is mixed. While some poems capture delicate states of feeling, many suffer from unfocused themes and lackadaisical language. Overall, though, this is a sensitive, thoughtful collection from a woman who learned long ago that "to retain the freshness of experience" one must be "willing to face the strangeness and horror of it."
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Activist/expatriate/poet/essayist Sherman, who has been committed to both radical politics and writing for the past 30 years, here shares a selection of both prose and poetry from those decades. These pieces bridge Sherman's coming of age during the heady early days of the New Left's "cultural revolution" at Berkeley, her self-imposed exile in Cuba and Nicaragua, and her participation in the beginnings of the so-called second wave of feminism in the United States. Many of her selections--on Derrida, Lacan, and the computer age, for example--are keenly reasoned and revealing; others, such as correspondence from her side (but not the other) of the "Jane Alpert affair," which split radical feminists, smack too much of the settling of old feuds. For university libraries with extensive poetry, women's studies, or radical politics collections.
- Beverly Miller, Boise State Univ. Lib., Id.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Curbstone Books
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0915306905
• ISBN 13: 9780915306909
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224