Out Here Flying: Lesbian Poetry

The GLBTRT has been reviewing books and movies in its newsletter since the early 1990s. Trace the evolution of queer publishing through these historic reviews. This review was originally published in Vol. 4, No. 2, Summer 1992.

Cover of Out Here FlyingOut Here Flying: Lesbian Poetry. By Jan Hardy. Sidewalk Revolution Press, 1986. Paper. $3.95. (ISBN 0-961-74060-4)

This collection of poetry explores better than any book of essays what it’s like to function in the world as a lesbian. Subjects range from sisters to mothers to teachers to cruising women to alcoholic friends to abused friends to exes to being the only single at a party full of couples. We can relate. Hardy tells stories; some poems have plots, and things happen. She writes with much humor and passion.

In the first poem, we learn the origin of her publishing company’s name, Sidewalk Revolution Press. The poet imagines a lesbian revolution if women would only go up to strange women on the streets and tell them ” … yr face looks like the sun with all that/ blond hair shining out like rays / & you really look beautiful.” The poet concludes, “I shd try it.”

Lyrical and flowing, the poems radiate with delicious images that linger. Her married sisters live in a world so remote that the poet’s letters are likened to “messages in bottles / lapping like waves against / the shores of their country.” She includes several erotic poems, presaging the later collection she edited, Wanting Women: An Anthology of Erotic Lesbian Poetry (1990). I highly recommend libraries purchase this slim, inexpensive, lavender-colored, stapled book. Readers will be enchanted by the images and by the love and caring expressed between women.

Reviewed by Kathy Ruffle
College of New Caledonia Library
Prince George, B.C.

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