Issue 1.2 Archives - LIBER Review

1.2 On the Cover

Charis Caputo

“March for Women’s Lives — Washington D.C.” Twenty years ago, the US Supreme Court was poised to consider Planned Parenthood of Southeastern PA v. Casey, and abortion rights advocates feared that the newly minted conservative majority would endorse a slew of restrictions (like parental consent and waiting periods) or even overturn Roe. On April 5, 1992, the recently formed Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) and Guerilla Girls (an anonymous street art collective formed in 1984 to disrupt sexism and

Poetry Comment

Katha Pollitt

What a pleasure to introduce five poems by the prolific and brilliant Molly Peacock, queen of rhyme and meter, who has done so much to bring contemporary freshness and zing and a sometimes-startling intimacy to formal poetry. In this grouping, Peacock writes about the death of her husband, Joyce scholar Michael Groden, about the strains of caring for a sick and dying person, no matter how beloved, and about the beginning of a new life

“Everything is Real”: Articulating Autofiction

Grace Ebert

In October 2021, the culture site Lit Hub published a cheeky advice column by Walker Caplan. To help readers define “autofiction,” the piece offers ten grounding principles for whether a work falls under its purview. They range from “autofiction is when a character lives in New York” to “when you write about something bad you’ve done, that’s autofiction. When you write about something bad done to you, that’s memoir.” Albeit satirical, the list elucidates enduring

‘Hiya Betty’: The Letters of Bessie Head

Jennifer Baumgardner

The generic-looking typescript (around two hundred pages of printer paper, bound with a rubber band) living in my office at Feminist Press predated me by many years. In 2015, when I excavated it from a drawer, I might have tossed it in the recycling bin but for the sticky note attached in the recognizable hand of my predecessor’s predecessor (i.e., Gloria Jacobs and Florence Howe), warning, Don’t throw away! Beneath that, centered in all caps:

Letters from Our Readers

Liber Review

I just finished reading issue 1 of LIBER cover-to-cover. What a wonderful contribution to the conversation! Half of it seemed to have been written directly to me. Thank you! I was especially pleased & surprised to find Charis Caputo—who wrote one of my favorite reviews of Women’s Liberation!, the anthology I edited with Honor Moore—discussing in “Just Go” some of the same subjects I wrote about in my 1993 essay “Women Writers of the Beat

Your Body is a Battleground

Jennifer Baumgardner

At the Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994, Loretta Ross, Toni Bond, and others coined the evocative term reproductive justice to make clear that women have human rights, including the “human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have” safely, and with our government playing an affirmative role in manifesting these rights. Women (aka human beings with human rights) have the power to give

Five Poems by Molly Peacock

Molly Peacock

Trending Anxiety Dreams

Rebecca Saltzman

The ghost of crypto futures Your Facebook posts from 2010 reappear for everyone to see A cursed mirror that pitches you MLM products Mitch McConnell All the phone calls you’ve been putting off The bras you stopped wearing during the pandemic are coming for revenge

A Woman Alone at a Beach Somewhere, Gazing into the Sea

Meg Whiteford

Who is this woman looking out toward the sea? She could be me, she could be someone you know—I won’t say it’s you, I don’t know you. She’s probably white, possibly gay, but probably not. Able-bodied enough to climb down treacherous rocks to be near the water. She’s dealing with heartbreak or pending heartbreak; she either longs to be alone or is lonely. Nothing can stop her from this contemplation. This is why she looks

Gratification

Kayla Martinez

Illustration by Mike Perry I surveyed his dorm room. Black comforter with matching pillow shams, athletic trophies above the bed, Narcos paused on the TV, a musty glass of water on the bedside table (dust gathered around the bottom), a bottle of CVS-brand lube. I catch a whiff of BO covered with something tingly, woody, irritable: Old Spice NightPanther, uncapped, on the floor at the foot of the bed. I could’ve been in my own

Issue 1.2