Chapter 5 develops the spider’s web as a paradigm for comics-making. What can Bechdel’s fear of vomit and her mother’s fear of spiders reveal about inherited attitudes toward the female body and inherited patriarchal values? How do her mother’s unrealized artistic ambitions shadow their bond? This chapter tangles with the spiderwebs that recur throughout Are You My Mother?. Spider webs, I posit, reveal the very productivity of the female body as precisely the sticking point for modern women writers; spiders, after all, extrude their silk from their bellies. However, the spider web attaches by another corner to the symbolism of 1970s lesbian feminism, where it takes on emancipatory political valences as a radial alternative to vertical power structures. The latter part of the chapter demonstrates how Bechdel reclaims the web as an emblem of queer kinship and feminist commitment and community. I conclude with The Secret to Superhuman Strength, with a mapping of its intertextual affiliation with the poet Adrienne Rich, in whom Bechdel discovers what the poet Muriel Rukeyser calls the “moving relation between the individual consciousness and the world.”

Chapter 6 introduces the concepts associated with supernatural transformations, metamorphosis, shapeshifting, and hybridity, each expressing a different approach to the transformation of the female body. Plath’s poems frequently seek inspiration from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which she interrogates the powerlessness of women who transform from human to vegetal form. The chapter situates Plath’s poetic narratives among her female contemporaries, such as Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and even Margaret Atwood, who rely on feminist retellings of classical myths to question concerns about women’s autonomy and social position. The chapter outlines Plath’s employment of the concept of shapeshifting, associated with witches and folkloric beliefs, to reflect on the liberatory powers the animal form (often flying creatures) offers to women. It also argues that Plath experiments with the fluid boundaries between the human and the nonhuman in one of her most well-known poems, ‘Ariel,’ which portrays an imaginative flying motion as transformation.

Exponential growth can be a head-scratcher. Accounts and taxonomies that seem inviting near the start of a growth curve can seem like fool’s errands afterwards. And the story of queer—or gay and lesbian, or queer and trans, or LGBTQ+, or LGBTQIA+– poetics since the late 1960s is a story of exponents, of proliferation from stigmatized rarity to celebrated (but still endangered) ubiquity. Does Randall Mann share linguistic goals with Pat Parker? Chen Chen with Samuel Ace? Reginald Shepherd with Carmen Giménez Smith? A sampling offered by me (a white, prosperous, midcareer, polyamorous, Northeastern trans woman with kids) may be more likely to include poets who share my identities, as well as my tastes, and to overlook those who do not. But there is—at least in the arts—no view from nowhere: one informed view is better than none.

This chapter discusses how contemporary poets are influenced and inspired by the rise of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s, which unleashed a broad surge of poetry by women who began to write openly about their lives and to use their work to directly critique sexism and patriarchy. The chapter examines debates and tensions within women’s poetry of the period, including fraught questions about how poetry might best address female experience, gender roles, race and intersectionality, the relation between poetry and politics, and the tension between more mainstream lyric approaches and more avant-garde experimental feminist poetry. The chapter focuses on a range of representative poets, including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Marilyn Chin, and Kathleen Fraser.

This chapter considers Elizabeth Bishop’s published and republished uncollected work focusing on her figuration of racial difference in both South and North America. It will engage with existing scholarship on Bishop’s Brazil poetry, as well as her problematic 1965 New York Times Magazine article on Rio’s 400th Carnival. Bishop’s poems engaging with racialised figures (“Manuelzinho,” “Faustina, or Rock Roses,” “Cootchie,” “Songs for a Colored Singer”) will be read against her engagement with and definition of a particular kind of whiteness, often in contrast to the primitive, exotic or native, as observed “In the Waiting Room.” This chapter ultimately maps Bishop’s cartography of racial otherness as a way of exploring the interiority (and integrity) of the self.