A review by robk
No More Masks: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets by Florence Howe

3.0

I picked this up at the local library book sale because I thought it sounded like an interesting anthology of poems. Reading this introduced me to a number of poets whose work I had not yet had the opportunity to read. I was particularly impressed with Nikki Giovanni's poems and plan on reading more of her stuff sometime.

I thought it was kind of nice that many of these women poets have become popular in present day anthologies--at least I remember studying a number of these women's work in my classes: poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Denise Levertov, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath. The anthology contains work by over 100 different poets, so it hardly represents any one poet, rather it focuses on what it means to be a woman and a poet and it highlights the work of an astonishing variety of voices.