Photo by World Resources Institute This post is packed with all the stuff I have been writing, reading, and learning about poetry and eco justice. Thinking about urgent issues like mass extinction, it has become clear to me in the last few years that social and ecological issues are inextricably linked. For example, dodgy building [...]
Category: Violence
Trauma, Poetry, and Punctuation
Edward Burne Jones: Proof of an illustration designed by Burne-Jones for the Kelmscott "Chaucer": p.441, 'The Legend of Goode Wimmen'; Philomene, with a woman (Philomela) standing by her loom holding a shuttle in an interior, with a half-woven tapestry with the story of Pholomene and Tereus, looking out of the window. 1896 I have been [...]
Sinister Myth: The Harpy and the Medusa
[Featured image by Christian Schloe, Lost in a Dream.] I am very excited this month to see the first episodes of my podcast going live, a project which I developed with Brendan Walsh. The title is Sinister Myth: How Stories We Tell Perpetuate Violence, and the logo was designed by the brilliant Breanne LeJeune. But [...]
Fright House: America, Halloween, and the Midterms
I have a new article out today in Wales Arts Review, which tries to capture the strange time before elections in America, when the midterm hype coincides with Halloween. Halloween was not really celebrated in the US until the 1920s, brought over by white immigrants, but it has become a national craze, and far more [...]
Frankenstein and Reproductive Rights 200 Years On
“If we could perceive death as a part of pregnancy, we might just take women more seriously.” These words are taken from a recent article on ‘Mothers as Makers of Death,’ published by Claudia Dey in the Paris Review, in which she affirms a darker alternative to the Hallmark version of motherhood. Mary Shelley also [...]
Revamped course next semester… on sexuality and violence…
I was recently really pleased to receive an Affordable Learning Exchange grant to revamp my course 'Sexuality and Violence.' Here's how it looks for next semester. ----- Sexuality Studies 5620: Sexuality and Violence Tuesday / Thursday 2.20pm – 3.40pm Ohio State University Spring 2019 ZoëBrigley Thompson thompson.3022@osu.edu Figure 1: Change Mural by Krystal Roig-Palmer, [...]
On Branwen’s Horses
I have been thinking and writing about the Welsh legend of Branwen recently, in this micro-chapbook out with the Poetry Annals, Blind Horse Elegy (cover image by Victoria Brookland), and in the title poem itself which was a runner up in the Hopper Poetry Prize. When I think of the story of Branwen, I think of [...]
Thoughts After the Solstice on Instinct and Harm
On the summer solstice two years ago, there was a big, beautiful supermoon. It was 2016 – pre-election, pre-Trump. That night, I woke up for no obvious reason, and downstairs I noticed a strange light coming through the glass doors. The moon was up, honey colored, clouds passing in long fingers across its face. I [...]
New Worlds, New Imaginaries: #metoo & #timesup
[This talk was given on March 3rd 2018 at a talk for a Heforshe event at the Ohio State University.] I want to start by quoting a short poem by the British author Jane Commane. The poem is called ‘Landmarks’ and it describes the threat of violence in our everyday spaces, asks how or why [...]
The Usual Rape Myths in the Case of Stanford Swimmer
The Stanford swimmer rape case is hugely infuriating, because it reveals the rape myths that still police men and women, and have an enormous influence on how crimes are perceived. This comes as no surprise to me, as someone who devotes much of their time to debunking these myths, but let’s lay it out, and see [...]
