Overview

To Be (a Woman) is a poetry collection that examines womanhood through the past, the workplace, relationships, mental health, travel, and metaphor. Poetry, nonfiction, and storytelling converge in a compelling journey of self-discovery and self-love. These poems hold both strength and vulnerability, without apology, without sentimentality. They trace the daily indignities women endure, the love and expansiveness women also carry, and the quiet, fierce work of reclaiming identity in a world that often dismisses them. This book embodies themes of examining societal expectations, reclaiming identity, and empowering voices. It is for any woman who has struggled to name what she feels, and will recognize herself instantly in these pages.

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9798993122946

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Reviews

""In To Be a (Woman), Rachel Turney uses the natural world and familial relationships as her muses, to claim her identity and encourage other women to do the same. In poems such as ""About Me"" and ""Permission to Speak?"" - which proffers topics like, ""Can I be assertive without being a bitch?"" - Turney explores womanhood in the modern era; whilst poems like ""Little Pieces"" deal with the various roles women play; and ""My Mother, The Poet"" addresses the sometimes rough edges around mother-daughter relationships. Turney also spends a fair amount of time describing - through poems such as ""She Says"" and others - what identity might look like for an immigrant woman. Throughout the book, which includes several concrete poems and a bit of photography, Turney considers what she wants to be remembered for - not only as a woman, but as a human being, with pieces like, ""I Read My Own Poetry Sometimes"" and ""Final Word."" Ultimately, in this brave and artistic collection, Turney seems to be pleading with society - to see her, to see women everywhere, and to see how hard women work, just 'to be.'"" Samantha Terrell, poet/author/editor ""To Be (a Woman) simmers with frustration at the daily indignations that women endure but is punctuated by poems that triumph in biting back, ranging from literal neck-chomping to quiet lists of women in history. Interspersed among this thorny undercurrent are poems that embrace the love and expansiveness of womanhood: connection with maternal ancestry, nature, and personal vignettes the express womanhood in way that let us into the author's world - portraits of kissing that decorate a home and covert messages to her mother. The collection is a combination of poems that bristle and poems that sing, since women do both every day."" Deepa Rajan, PhD, author of The Greatest Rebellion ""In her collection, To Be (a Woman), Rachel Turney insists that womanhood is less an individual experience, more a coalescing. Mother, grandmother, friend, siren, sister. And then there are the men who give us edges: ""I showed him my fangs / and swallowed him whole."" ""All with a rhythm I choose,"" the speaker announces, feeling at once at home in a power that she ceaselessly must assert. Turney writes, ""Someone is listening / now"" and To Be (a Women) answers: here is a jumping off point, here is a listening."" Allison Field Bell, author of All That Blue and Bodies of Other Women

Author Information

Dr. Rachel Turney is an accomplished author featured in dozens of acclaimed publications. Her work takes a critical eye to the state of womanhood in society, shaped by her time in higher education and her life as a global citizen.

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