Trickster Feminism

by Anne Waldman

New from poet and performer Anne Waldman—a witty, visionary collection that meditates on gender, beauty, love, and existence

How do we investigate the psyche of our playful resistance to assumptions and norms through poetry? What mischief can we invoke as purveyors of a future feminism, its ambiguity, and power? In her new collection, Trickster Feminism, Anne Waldman looks to the imagination of mercurial possibility, to the spirits of the doorway and of crossroads, and to language that jolts the status quo of how one troubles gender and outwits and topples patriarchy. Waldman summons Tarot's Force Arcana, the Bible's Miriam, the passion of the suffragettes, and various messengers and heroines of historical, hermetic, and heretical stance. Melpomene, the muse of tragic poetry, is highlighted as an inspiration for dirge, prophecy, and imagination in action. Mythopoetics, shape shifting, quantum entanglement, chance operation, magic, and divination play inside the field of these poems. Tricksters turn many ways, as does poetry, and in Waldman's rendering, a female trickster's manipulation may be apocalyptic.

Genres: Poetry, Feminism, Gender

112 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 2018

About the author

Anne Waldman was part of the late Sixties poetry scene in the East Village. She ran the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project, and gave exuberant, highly physical readings of her own work.

She became a Buddhist, worshipping with the Tibetan Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who would also become Allen Ginsberg's guru. She and Ginsberg worked together to create a poetry school, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, at Trungpa's Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Anne Waldman is one of the most interesting, vibrant and unpredictable members of the post-Beat poetry community. Her confluence of Buddhist concerns and thought-paths with sources of physicality and anger is particularly impressive (did you get all that?).

She was featured in Bob Dylan's experimental film 'Renaldo and Clara.'

Reviews

[Dan Wilcox]

Shamanistic chants & rants, continuing her attack on the patriarchy, in defense of justice & the environment. But always the Word, the magic of word play, high energy poetics. The least boring book of poetry you will read.

[Beatrice]

A very long short book. Read with a dictionary. Take your time.

[John]

Spot on Oracle Seer--

[Rob]

It's good to be reminded that we are the problem we try to hide from. Only by looking unblinking at ourselves will we be able to remake the world to a kinder, more beautiful place. Anne Waldman doesn't let us look away from the parts of us we don't like.

[Jillian]

I stopped about 20% in. I think some people will enjoy sitting and unraveling this but I did my time in parsing out academic works in women's and gender studies and I'm tired!!

[Kaye]

I didn't like these poems at all. I picked up this book after finding it in a library catalog search when I was looking up literature that mentioned quantum physics. There is a little bit of that going on in one of the poems, but overall, I found the poems to be extremely disjointed and fragmentary. So Titanic. Sometimes, I enjoyed a few verses, and I stuck through to the end because I don't read much experimental poetry and wanted to give the author a chance.

[John]

" a kind of pinwheel parataxis, to offer necessary second sight . We are summoned to peer past appearances, past the sense of square one beginnings and ineluctable dead ends. Instead we are invited to raise our gaze afresh and to rise to our feet." Erica Hunt

[Roger Green]

Let these words work on us like scripture.

[Christy George]

Anne Waldman is someone with an extensive vocabulary and a singular vision for how she wants to present her work to the world. I am not sure if I have ever read anything so difficult, so stylized. This is important. That is obvious. I needed a dictionary to read through this, ever so slowly. I was inspired in parts by the call to arms to Waldman's "suffragettes" to topple the patriarchy. I just need a lot of extra time and help unpacking her words.

[Maggie Gordon]

I feel like I should have liked this volume more than I did. A couple months later, I barely remember what was in this one. Alas, obviously not for me!

[Jo]

Words on a page. I couldn't pull together meaning out of any of it.

[Seth]

Deep, meaningful, intersectional feminist poetry and prose? I couldn't ask for anything more

[Jerrie]

Poetry has gone academic. This one is good but I had to look up many of the references and I'm an English major with an MFA. Nevertheless, I think the poet is important and the read worthwhile.

[Kerfe]

"History will decide moments, but you live them"

Waldman's verse is like a fevered dream, entangled in a violent battle with both itself and the rest of the world. In navigating the maze of history, hierarchy, and patriarchy, she floods the pages with torrents of words and images that at times seem to make no sense--until suddenly, moving back and circling ahead, a narrative emerges.

"...she renewed her practice of circling, of surrounding, of chanting. She remembered the flood she was inside of might return....Elements dance in collusion....Earth trying to tell us something."

Waldman zooms in and out of our lies, our deceptions, our illusions, our misgivings, our failings, our protests, our destructions, our refusals, our small victories, our beauty, our dreams. She ends with a call to action:

"but now get supper to homeless
shivering at crossroads
with keening imagination
however jinxed!"

Even as the knots seem to tie us up in ever more complicated situations, we can still attend to the basics--food, clothing shelter, connection--"just scribble out poems".

[Issy Stephens]

There was some really beautiful imagery in the poems and a lot of bookmarks placed in my copy. However, as with a lot of the other reviews, this book is hard to read and has a lot of very niche references and ideas from all over the word - it was difficult to follow quite a lot of the time. I feel like I should have taken more time to sit with the words and figure them out but I didn’t want to, as there was such a dense amount of things that unpacking them seemed like it would take years. Maybe it’s something to go back to again and see how much has changed. I am always questioning whether (feminist) activism through poetry is tangible if inaccessible - there’s a lot here which is important, but it’s difficult to approach.

[Laurel Perez]

"In the past, Waldman has expressed how she felt “insulted that the epic is seen as a male form,” and has made a conscious effort to reclaim such forms as female too" (Interview with the author, Poetry Project Newsletter, 2003). I think knowing this helps one to better read her intentions with this lengthy meditation, that seeks to remind readers that poetry is not theater, it is meant to reflect and subvert. This entire collection is full of shapeshifting, in terms of form, as well as the content. Waldman looks to possibility, to language that jolts the status quo of how one troubles gender and outwits patriarchy. What she has created is an intersectional experience.

[Thomas Rasmussen]

Jeg har aldrig tidligere læst Waldman - men har haft Trickster Feminism på listen siden den udkom.

Waldman er jo legendarisk og hun har været med i hele den del af den amerikanske litteratur, som jeg har interesseret mig for.

Så det var på tide.

Men desværre bryder jeg mig ikke om digtene. For mig læser de som pluknedslag i mellemregninger og ordbøger. Garneret med mytologi og ordspil.

Fejlen er uden tvivl min. Trickster Feminism minder mig om Finnegans Wake eller Burroughs cut-up..., som jeg heller ikke kan lide. Jeg vil ikke underkende Joyce, Burroughs og Waldmans talent, vision..., geni... men jeg bryder mig ikke om at læse bøgerne.

Tilbage til Myles!!!

[Taylor Jackson]

3 ⭐️ Smart, chaotic, and primal, I wanted to love this book of feminist poetry — it intersects with other literatures such as critical feminist geography, ecofeminism, black feminist theory and more, while exploring themes of posthumanist entanglement. I should be the ideal audience for this book, and yet I often felt like it was meant for some other reader. There were a few really striking moments, but for the most part, the style of writing often felt more like an assortment of words than a coherent thought — it was often inaccessible to me, or at least hard to immerse myself within. Overall, I like the themes of this book but found it difficult to really engage with. It served more as an affective landscape than a read.

[catharine]

Just terrible.

I should say more. If it is a book of poetry, it does not have the trick of showing the reader their own thoughts, of making obvious things that are complicated.

If it is a book of prose it flits around too erratically. It makes the reader do all the work to catch up and withholds EVERYTHING from them.

It is neither generous nor full of truth and I did not carry from it anything of value.

[K.]

The day said I am woman. The day got up and walked this far then paused to take stock. It was the last chance to be observant and cry and stomp and take stock. What worth if not be accountable. It would be theater, a spectacle, come pay, or come lie down in fluid bosom of woe mankind.

[Matthew Stolte]

Wow!

[Jess]

"Whatever you meet unexpectedly on the path, embrace."

[Chance]

This was wiiiiild.

[Emma]

I like her poetry more than prose

[Haley]

I read this book when it first came out and thought it was profound then. Now, in 2025, it eerily lands as prophetic to me. Such an important work!

[Stranger Steph]

The fragmented style made this an highly challenging book to get through.

[Aimee]

what’s up with this chick?

[HoneyBakedAmbs]

I mostly really enjoyed these poems; there were a few that were either over my head or just not exactly my speed, that said.

[Drew]

"...are you genitally organized?", Anne Waldman asks a little past halfway through "Trickster Feminism." But is the "you" literally YOU as in your self-perception or is it the larger culture in which we all live? The feminine, the woman, the mother, the daughter, the witch, the goddess, the bitch, the crone, the girl, the female is constantly inserted/resurfaced, interrupting/agitating this 2017 collection by the High Priestess of Post-Beat Poetry. Sometimes her vision sharpens, sometimes it seems to float around us, sometimes it's fuzzily out of reach. But it's always there. A couple of the poems ("radio play: face-down-girl," "strangling me with your lasso of stars") come with elucidating footnotes; the "notes & citations" section at the end doesn't enlighten so much as lead to other doors. Those who don't know the meaning of words like "apotropaic," "labrys," or "orisha" or know what the Abhidharma is -- in short, readers like me -- might do well to keep a dictionary near at hand. Do it! You will be rewarded. There's nothing wrong with poetry that builds your vocabulary. Now as for retention... we shall see.

[Jennifer]

This is another collection that has been on my shelves for a while and that I am happy to finally get to. This is a collection of connection and entanglements, dropping references to religions and historical figures and languages around the world and weaving them in with the political and moral and environmental catastrophes of our day to illuminate the human condition -- especially the feminine. The array and pace of the references can be dizzying -- this seems like poetry best experienced as spoken performance.