This collection of lyric essays by award-winning poet Kim Moore explore the dynamics of performing poetry as a female poet – confronting the implications of being a female on public display, with the connotations of sexual objectification, in a context that traditionally disregards the body. Kim states “With the strides and gains made through the #MeToo movement, I believe the time is right for a book like this to make an impact. As a female poet, I know there is a need for such a book to examine the intersection between writing, performing, feminism and sexism. I wish this book had been written when I first started working as a freelance writer and I’ve had many conversations with other female poets who have also confirmed my thinking – that female poets are navigating these things regularly, and yet nobody is really writing or talking about them.”  

The book draws on her experiences of writing and performing the poems in her second collection All the Men I Never Married. It is a balance of memoir, academic treatise and poetry, though the author’s emphasis is on writing in a popular way and making the subject accessible to a wide audience. To achieve this her models have been Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Sarah Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life.  

The book’s subjects include heckling at poetry readings and other interactions; problems with the ‘male gaze’ and what the ‘female gaze’ might look like in poetry; ‘guilty for being a man’: how guilt can be useful if it can bring about change; how writing poetry about sexism can shed add meaning to the term; the objectification of men and women, and ‘bad faith’ arguments.