Epigram

EPIGRAM Adrienne Su No man is an island, I learned in first-year Latin. About women, they said nothing. until we got to feminism: "Work, not a husband or children, is a woman's reason for being," and I gave myselfto poetry as women who preceded me had given themselves to men. The poem made a private home where I walked from room to room as iffrom earth to heaven and thrived on air and speech and hunger, in domestic peace. There the disasters began. Men were taking the house apart with neither metaphor nor art, with only their bare hands. Then there was nothing for sustenance except the novel turbulence, which flattened every word, which is how I learned the skill ofsilence, and line by line willed myselfgradually back to the world. [Meridians:/eminism, race, transnationalism 2001, vol. 1, no. 2, p. 154]©2001 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. 154 ...