A SET OF VILLANELLES IN RESPONSE TO: (RE)BIRTHING THE FEMININE IN ACADEME (EDITED BY LINDA HENDERSON, ALISON L. BLACK, AND SUSANNE GARVIS)

In this review of (Re)birthing the feminine in academe: Creating spaces of motherhood in patriarchal contexts (2020) edited by L. Henderson, A. L. Black and S.Garvis), I take a poetic-is-personal-is-political approach in the form of a series of villanelles. Villanelle is a highly structured poetic form comprised of five tercets followed by a quatrain, with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The fixed form of the villanelle is taken in this review to represent the highly structured and strictured institution of the university and yet turned around and made subversive through a creative and critical feminist language of maternity—much like the villanus origins of the word itself.