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Sonja Åkesson -- Annalisa Alloatti and Mirella Bentivoglio -- Lenora de Barros -- Mirella Bentivoglio -- Amanda Berenguer -- Suzanne Bernard -- Gay Beste -- Alison Bielski -- Tomaso Binga -- Irma Blank -- Marianna Bocian -- Blanca Calparsoro -- Paula Claire -- Betty Danon -- Agnes Denes -- Mirtha Dermisache -- Amelia Etlinger -- Ilse Garnier -- Anna Bella Geiger -- Madeline Gins -- Bohumila Grögerová -- Ana Hatherly -- Susan Howe -- Ruth Jacoby -- Tamara Janković -- Annalies Klophaus -- Marzenna Kosińska -- Barbara Kozlowska -- Katalin Ladik -- Liliana Landi -- Liliane Lijn -- Françoise Mairey -- Giulia Niccolai -- Ry Nikonova -- Anna Oberto -- Jennifer Pike -- Bogdanka Poznanović -- Betty Radin -- Giovanna Sandri -- Mira Schendel -- Mary Ellen Solt -- Chima Sunada -- Salette Tavares -- Colleen Thibaudeau -- Biljana Tomić -- Silvia Trevale -- Patrizia Vicinelli -- Rosmarie Waldrop -- Hannah Weiner -- Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. This volume presents works by fifty women who may not have identified themselves as concrete poets, but whose work focused on multiplying the possibilities opened up by attending to language's materiality, and on challenging the very constructs that support the binaries divorcing a poem's physical properties from its more subjective ones. Their work may very well represent the "tension of word-things in space-time" that the Brazilian Noigandres group saw as unique to concrete poetry in 1958, but they are less concerned with using "graphic space as structural agent" than with liberating letters from words, and words from the conventions that dictate how they should function in ordinary language and in traditional literary texts. "Women in Concrete Poetry" is a kaleidoscope, traversed by many views and perspectives that defy any attempt to define concrete poetry in strict terms "This expansive volume is the first collection of concrete poetry by women, with artists and poets from the US, Latin America, Europe and Japan, whose work departs from more programmatic approaches to the genre. Their word-image compositions are unified by an experimental impetus and a radical questioning of the transparency of the word and its traditional arrangement on the page. Owing, perhaps, to the fact that concrete poetry's attempt to revolutionize poetry foregrounded the male-dominated channels in which it circulated, some of the women in this volume--Ilse Garnier or Giulia Niccolai, for instance--were active in the movement's epicenters, yet failed to attain a visibility or ample representation in international anthologies such as Emmett Williams's Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967) and Mary Ellen Solt's Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968). This anthology celebrates their legacy and recontextualizes word-image compositions by other figures working independently. It gathers work by over 40 writers and artists, including Lenora de Barros (Brazil), Mirella Bentivoglio (Italy), Amanda Berenguer (Uruguay), Suzanne Bernard (France), Tomaso Binga (Italy), Blanca Calparsoro (Spain), Paula Claire (UK), Betty Danon (Turkey), Mirtha Dermisache (Argentina), Ilse Garnier (France), Anna Bella Geiger (Brazil), Bohumila Grögerová (Czech Republic), Ana Hatherly (Portugal), Susan Howe (USA), Tamara Jankovic (Serbia), Annalies Klophaus (Germany), Barbara Kozlowska (Poland), Liliana Landi (Italy), Liliane Lijn (USA), Françoise Mairey (France), Giulia Niccolai (Italy), Jennifer Pike (UK), Giovanna Sandri (Italy), Mira Schendel (Brazil), Chima Sunada (Japan), Mary Ellen Solt (USA), Salette Tavares (Portugal), Colleen Thibaudeau (Canada), Rosmarie Waldrop (USA) and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (Germany)."--Amazon website (viewed on October 22, 2020)
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