Of Our Own Accord

What began as a Women's History Month celebration became a deep practice of awareness of female expression, agency, and self-knowledge for poet Mary Silwance. The culmination is the shared voices of over sixty poets who share their underrepresented experiences of women's embodied poetry. Their candid and profound poems shed light, widen awareness, and create space for those who identify as female. Here is a fem-centric collection of poetry, prose, and visual art to honor women's experiences, geographies, and conversations in which women live, move, and have their being. Here, you'll find what's been silenced and explore what's been censored. From menarche to menopause, first kiss to last night, from preterm to pronouns to pretend to portend. Here is the most tender, wildest, most awkward, funniest, scariest, transcendent, saddest, and most satisfying. These poets address the inadequate, imprecise representation of women's embodiment, which has been appropriated or disregarded in popular culture, public policy, and societal assumptions. Here are the significant and quotidian details in their own voices, of their own accord.