Judy Grahn

from “A History of Lesbianism” collected in A Woman is Talking to Death and Other Poems by Judy Grahn.

The first poem I read by Judy Grahn was A Woman is Talking to Death. The second was Edward the Dyke. In the summer of 1984, I found her Another Mother Tongue in the Sisterhood Bookstore in LA’s Westwood and discovered lesbians had a culture that went back centuries. Like every woman in her twenties, I thought my friends and I had invented all our vices. That was the same summer I came out.

The Highest Apple started as a chapter of Another Mother Tongue but grew too long and became its own book. It’s about Sappho, and Gertrude Stein and how lesbians and poets and poetry intertwine. Truly, lesbians are a poetic people. It is in our name, twice.