In her chapbook First Wife (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013), Wiseman has done a difficult thing in manifesting the story of Lilith in modern poems chronicling the demise of a marriage.
Difficult because, let’s be honest, you say “Lilith” and some people think antagonizing uber-feminism. They think anger. But though I believe there’s a time and a place for strategic anger, these poems aren’t angry, aren’t based in that time or place. These are solemn poems that make the point that true feminism is more concerned with women’s individual and interconnected lives than in defining us according to our significant others and children—the more “traditional” relationships many of us experience and have in common.
In her identification with the biblical Lilith, who, to quote Alicia Ostriker’s blurb, is “the mythic first wife of Adam, who escaped subservience to her husband and her husband’s God and became stigmatized as a demoness,” Wiseman’s speaker proves without preaching that self-respect is a survival tool in a patriarchal world.
