The Stenographer's Breakfast

by Frances McCue

Winner of the 1992 Barnard New Women Poets award.

Genres: Poetry

92 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1992

About the author

Frances McCue is a writer and poet living in Seattle, where she is writer-in-residence at the University of Washington's Undergraduate Honors Program. She was the founding director of Richard Hugo House from 1996 to 2006. McCue is the author of The Stenographer's Breakfast, winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize."

Reviews

[Laura Hartmark · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the persona of stenographer, McCue explores what it means to be used as an instrument of transcription, where the authority/authorship of words stems from the *dictator* and the woman is employed as an object of transmission. Heartbreaking, resistant, and fierce, this meditation on what words capture and what they lose is ultimately transformative to the sensitive reader. It continues to befuddle me why simply everyone is not talking, and then talking again about this book. It appears to have slipped out the back door of the court room, like the stenographer herself. And perhaps that is the greatest spectacle of all - the book which is a work of art, working as silently, invisibly as its art.