Pamela Hughes’s second collection of poems, Femistry, is a chemical marriage of reactions and actions that honor the everyday and sacred lives of women and simultaneously advocates for the redemption of the disrespected female body. These women-centric power poems are a kind of palimpsest rearing up and writing over the rutted, often deadly, narrative pathways of patriarchy. The pages pull us into the lull and hullabaloo of lyric and narrative explorations that draw on mythological and historical figures—including Persephone, Athena, Leda, Hatshepsut, Wangarĩ Matthai, Emily Dickinson, Frida Kahlo and Gertrude Stein. Hughes’s poems are irreverent, sometimes funny and often fiery. She takes aim and lets her weapon of words fly to strike toxic masculinity, misogyny, domestic abuse and rape culture. This is a place where breasts and vaginas are the new warriors, and “softness is another kind of weapon.” We find the juxtaposition of history—man’s hard on for war and its vast sprawl of desolation—“a Thracian army of thousands,” “or a long line of a Roman legion pushing back horizons” and the diminutive and regenerative power of the supple:
,
small
things
mean
more
,
The feminist narrative builds with each of her serious or seriously playful speakers—her bold array of women and girls at play, pray, prey, and protest—of women in nature that set a path towards awareness. Femistry is a startling collection that invites you to be part of the chemical reaction of “the jouled-room / the jeweled womb / the ways in which her properties interact, combine and change—a vibration of substances / breaking their bonds, with an exchange of atoms / solution concentration—/and the use of these processes / to form / new worlds.”