About the Book:
Poetry. Women’s Studies.
“In ALL WE HAVE IS OUR VOICE, Carole Stone’s fierce dramatic monologues, delivered by the wives and lovers of such titans as Tolstoy, Lincoln, Freud, Yeats, Joyce, and (Dylan) Thomas, incisively protest patriarchal privilege and exploitation. Taut ekphrastic poems aptly probe the artistic struggles and transports of Kahlo, Schiele, Chagall, (Lucien) Freud, and others. And Stone also pays heartfelt tribute to literary figures such as Vallejo, Crane, Akhmadulina and Ratushinskaya who encounter extremity.”–Thomas Fin
Read an Excerpt:
Featured in Aug/Sept 2019 Issue: Fierce Female
Mary Shelley Beside Mary Wollstonecraft’s Grave
They say a woman could not have written
such a tale, that it is a ghost story
I overheard the men telling
the stormy night we matched wits —
Percy, Lord Byron and Coleridge —
three geniuses and me.
My maker, my muse, who left me
motherless at my birth,
I create a creature, unnatural, wild dark.
Here is my book, monster with the dull eye,
yellow skin that hardly covers his muscles
and arteries; my shriveled, nameless, infant child.
Frida Kahlo’s The Broken Column, 1944
Nails tacked into the sheet
draped around me from the waist down,
as if I were in the gynecologist’s office
mourning the child I lost,
my back, bloody
as the backs of the penitents
who corn whip themselves,
the column held to my chin
like a gun about to go off,
my naked breasts protrude
from the brace tight
around my rib cage.
I’m sick of it,
operation after operation,
suffering I can’t shake.
My body survives in the sky,
wisps of blue, and the earth,
an undulating green, landscape
of Mexico whose contours I love.
Martyr, saint, muse.
A woman with ordinary sorrow.