AustLit

Woman Speak

-sometimes rude, never crude - explores topics where the great men of literature never dared venture.

'Louise Nicholas and Jude Aquilina have melded a sensual, textured and evocative collection of poems about the lives of women, of all ages. The poems challenge and delight as they traverse women's experience, recovering women's bodies and lives using the ultimate language of life that is poetry. The many selves contained here are testimony to strength and struggle, failure and laughter, old female histories, witcheries and memories, 'the salted wound', jostling pheromones, the ridiculousness of lycra, the indignities of gynaecology, the short loves of adolescence, the risque deliciousness of sexual encounter, myths and realities from conception to old age. The writing is, in turn, celebratory, passionate, quirky, frank, moving, sassy and upfront about choosing to speak as women and as poets, no holds barred.' - Jill Jones