Mermaids in the Basement

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carolyn Kizer has compiled this collection devoted to one hundred of the finest poems written by women. She begins with a woman writing anonymously in the fifteenth century and takes us up to the present with such important contemporary authors as Marianne Moore, Adrienne Rich, Margaret Atwood, Sharon Olds, Louise Gluck, Jorie Graham, and Thylias Moss. This extraordinary anthology also contains such major poets as Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Gertrude Stein. And there is a generous selection of relatively unknown and wonderfully eccentric poets who wrote in obscurity during the past five hundred years.