Mary Jean Chan's poem "A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far", from "Flèche" (2019), takes it title from Adrienne Rich's 1981 collection "A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far"; it is also the first line of Rich's 1978 poem "Integrity". Chan's poem echoes Rich's "Integrity" in other ways, too: Rich writes of her "selves" and of "anger and tenderness", and Chan speaks of "my most helpful self" and "my impeccable persona" and of being "afraid of [her lesbian lover's] tenderness." Chan also praises "poets audacious enough to mention the body" – and in "The Dream of a Common Language" (1978), Rich was "audacious enough" to write poetry about lesbian sexuality. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 30 March 2022)
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