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Addressed to an expansive sisterhood of women writers, these letter-poems delve into the overlooked artistry of women who were wives, sisters, daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters of well-known male writers as well as seek advice from women writers who challenged social/political norms. With intimate confession, the poems explore the sacrifice and obstacles that these writers experienced. “What will be read in our pattern of bone?” asks Stice in a poem for Mexican poet and author Rosario Castellanos. Yet, Stice’s poems move beyond the past and turn their gaze toward possibility for contemporary women and girls. She writes, “When she / took that bite, Eve set us free.” This is a book to be savored and shared: “such a new taste / an unexpected dessert of words.”

Wendy Mannis Scher, author of Fault

“Women have a history…” writes Lisa Stice in From Reluctant Earth, and indeed, Stice supplies a distinctly honest, evocative, and powerfully rendered history for literary women. Writers, authors, editors, poets, muses-many of whom have been misogynistically tucked behind the fame and work of their male partners and relatives-are given beautiful homage in poem after poem. The result is a viscerally feminist work which belongs in every book collection.

Raquel Vasquez Gilliland, author of Lightning in Her Hands

From Reluctant Earth cultivates a garden of dramatic monologues, apostrophes, and lyric reflections wherein poet Lisa Stice pushes against efforts to deem the work of women writers, educators, scientists, and activists as less-than and instead tends to their significance in public memory and relevance in our present moment. From Lucretia Mott to Martha Gellhorn and Meera Bai to Gabriela Mistral, Stice’s poems serve to document, delight, resist, and intrigue. Closing the collection with a beautiful nocturne that confirms her own daughter’s participation in a feminist tradition of empowerment and celebration, Stice’s From Reluctant Earth is as edifying as it is enlightening.

Tara Ballard, author of House of the Night Watch

In her newest collection, poet Lisa Stice explores a lineage of women: editors, novelists, autobiographers, translators, playwrights, composers, writers of prose and poetry. In her poem, “In Remembrance of All Things Small,” Stice writes, “…wild again. / You will not be forgotten.” Here, a collection of odes to writers whose voices are remarkable, memorable, and worth both knowing and revisiting. Woven throughout is the speaker’s voice, ending with a shared moment and tender reflection with her own daughter, a recognition that they, too, are rooted in this succession of creatives. As is the human experience, we are here but for a flash. How are words and their gatherers best remembered? Stice’s poetry contemplates this idea with poignancy and care.

Kersten Christianson, author of Curating the House of Nostalgia

To sit down and spend time with Lisa Stice’s new collection, From Reluctant Earth, is to be reminded of how women writers have often toiled in the shadows of their male counterparts and how many of them remained in those shadows all their writing lives, how important it was for them to claim their own subjects and perspectives, and how they had to discover a genuine way of speaking, writing, and seeing that was unique to them, not just an imitation of male writers in vogue during their lifetimes.

It is said often that we “stand on the shoulders of giants,” those who paved the way for us, those whose names and writings we barely recognize. Lisa Stice has brought them forward to introduce them to us in this new collection of poems.

Anne Caston, author of Flying Out with the Wounded

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