From Don Yorty:

I met up with Anne Waldman on a Friday last April at her house in the West Village to record her reading from First Baby Poems, a favorite book of mine. Anne had just come from Penguin Books where she’d been preparing for the publication of her new book, Trickster Feminism. After First Baby Poems, I asked if she’d read from the upcoming book as well, and Anne did, getting out her type-written pages with revisions from the recent meeting. “Trickster Feminism. I’d come up with the title, and then I had to write a book. Because I wanted to be funnier—things were so dire.” What Anne is referring to is the 2016 election, and the protests that came after. At the Women’s March, Anne began to write spurred on by the gathered moment. In the poem denoument at Trump Tower she chants: Om Man Be Gone, a performance piece not to be performed by the writer, but by the reader. Resist, but with a laugh and the camaraderie of those around you, and even of those who’ve come before.

Here it is July and I am holding Trickster Feminism in my hands. It’s dedicated, I see, to three women, all recently dead, Pauline Oliveras, Joanne Kyger, and Geri Allen, a composer, poet and musician, with this inscription:

pushing against the darkness many decades

with silence, poetry, sound, wit,

radical exploratory consciousness

We are all in this together, and always are with help from the past for the present. The bright cover by Laurie Anderson, turquoise and vermilion, holds the image of a feisty dakini rabbit that Anne had brought back from India, feminine muse and spirit guide, ready for any trick like the indomitable Anne Waldman herself, whose tour de force of words no idiot president will ever out talk or talk down.

Ladies and gentlemen, Anne Waldman.