This volume contains work from every phase of Judy Grahn’s career, including poems from all of her major poetry collections, such as “The Common Woman,” “A Woman is Talking to Death,” and the previously unpublished “Mental”; a number of her groundbreaking essays (“Writing from a House of Women” and the newly revised “Ground Zero: The Rise of Lesbian Feminism,” among others); as well selected fiction and the full-length play, The Queen of Swords. Gathering together the varying strands of Grahn’s work together in this book makes visible the tremendous scope of her contribution as a feminist thinker, activist, and literary artist.

“Judy Grahn is the direct inheritor of that passion for life in the woman  poet, that instinct for true power, not domination, which poets like Barrett  Browning, Dickinson, H.D., were asserting in their own very different ways and voices.”

–Adrienne Rich, from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence

“People always ask me about my favorite musicians but no one ever asks about my favorite poets. When I was nineteen I discovered the poetry of Judy Grahn, and I was so moved by A Woman Is Talking to Death, it’s still one of my favorite poems ever, in the world.”    

–Ani DiFranco 

“Judy Grahn has done more to create a women’s literature than any other writer in the past half century.”

–Ron Silliman 

First published in 1996, Gulf Dreams is the story of a Chicana who comes of age in a racist, rural Texas town. Through memory, the protagonist reexamines her unresolved obsessive love for a young woman, her best friend since childhood.

“Tejana Emma Pérez is an important voice in Chicana literature. This amalgam of life history, creative non-fiction, psychoanalytic treatise and fictional and fictionalized memoirs is also a welcome addition to queer literature. Pérez truly creates her own sitio y lengua in a Chicana lesbian cultural terrain, where the boundaries between past and present and the world of dreams blur. In Gulf Dreams, a Chicana dyke becomes the active subject of history working through the haunting of desire, tracking the pleasure of pain, and ultimately relating that loss to betrayal. Trapped between visions, she recounts her search for meaning through the broken body, stating, ‘I am my only real witness.’”

–Gloria Anzaldúa, author of Borderlands/ La Frontera

“Gulf Dreams is Emma Perez’s signature work. Not only does it tell the dirty story of family abuse and misogynistic violence that plagues the Chicano/a community–which itself forms the basis of Perez’s famous theoretical constructs, “sitio y lengua” and “the decolonial imaginary”–but it is also a pithy rumination on the nature of romantic obsession, and the self-destructive behaviors and addictions that serve as internalized revenge against rape and conquest of the brown female body. This has the lyrical eroticism and colonial subtext of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover and the gritty cruelty of Amores Perros.”

–Alicia Gaspar de Alba

“A powerful, gripping, and disturbing story of passion and betrayal, survival and vengeance, compulsion and resilience, told in arresting images and fragmented dreamlike narrative.”

–Teresa de Lauretis, author of The Practice of Love and Figures of Resistance

What’s so refreshing about Agabian’s prose is her marvelously open, daring, and honest inquiry into the self. Our “enfant terrible”—she has yet again managed to capture us with her quirky, brilliant stories.

—Shushan Avagyan, author of Girk-anvernagir; translator of I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian