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Singing Back to the Sirens by Margaret DeRitter

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Singing Back to the Sirens explores the many ways that desire and love, loss and grief, can shape a woman’s life. The poems in this two-part collection look at the loneliness of a newborn for her sick mother, the first stirrings of sexual desire for a best friend, the treacherous leap from a sheltered world of faith into lesbian life, the frustrations of falling for straight women, the alchemy of falling in love, the aftermath of losing it. In the first section, the poet sings back to the many women she has loved. In the second, she sings back to the one who sang the sweetest and the saddest songs.


Details
Genre: Poetry
​ISBN:978-1-950730-28-5
Publication Date: March 3, 2020

Reviews

“Taken together, these achingly beautiful and gutsy poems represent an autobiography of love, from early crushes to coming out to a Calvinist mother in a New Jersey landscape and its sea-salt air to the speaker’s erotic coming-of-age—first gay bar, first girlfriend—and finally adult love and marriage, and the marriage’s startling dissolution against the mucky inland lakes and icy realms of Michigan. This collection is unflinching, honest, and spare in its insistent descriptions of grief’s volatility and its silences. DeRitter never bails us out, never shuts the tap on the speaker’s heroic, lavish yearning.”
 
— Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl (finalist for Pulitzer Prize in Poetry) and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl