Where the Poetry Is the Political. (Books).(Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory)(Book Review)

Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory

by Linda Garber

Columbia University Press

262 pages, $49.95 ($18.50 paper)

HAS A RETRO WAVE of lesbian feminism washed over the country? Have we arrived in the post-queer era? What is it about lesbian feminist writings that has endured? The answers, I think, can be found in the poetry of the age, and in Linda Garber's book Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory. Garber has written a smart, readable, wide-ranging examination of five poets whose writings helped to define early lesbian feminist theory and who, according to Garber's account, deserve some credit for their contributions to the current body of queer theory. While Identity Poetics certainly engages in some academic turf debates, what I like most about the book is how much it focuses on the poets and their work.

Garber, who teaches English and women's studies at Santa Clara University, dedicates a full chapter to each of five poets: Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Anzaldua. In addition to addressing formal aspects of their poetry, Garber complements her close readings with well-documented historical background from interviews and other commentary. Whether writing about Parker's connections to the Black Arts writers of the 1960's or Anzaldua's use of pre-colonial and traditional Chicano imagery, Garber presents each poet's work with respect to its place in various literary and political movements. She also provides information about performance, publication, and critical reception of the work. The writing moves smoothly between the dense formulations of postmodernism and the easy flow of personal narrative.

What Garber sees in the poetry is "a sort of post-modern identity politics" that she calls "identity poetics." Though the definition of "identity poetics" is a little elusive, Garber knows it when she sees it, and she sees it most clearly in the poetry of working-class lesbians and lesbians of color. Central to their writing, particularly as it revolves around lesbian subjectivity, are issues of silence and voice, race and racism, class, gender, sex, and cultural mythologies. Identity poetics reveal both activist politics and notions of multiple identities. Garber finds these qualities in Parker's poetry, which on one page critiques the feminist movement shouting "SISTER! your foot is smaller,/ but it's still on my neck," and on the facing page questions the black power movement in a poem titled "Brother," which ends: "i'm no genius,/ but i do know! that system/ you hit me with/ is called/ a fist."