Grabbed

Starred review from September 1, 2020
The inspired editors of this richly diverse, creative, and gender-inclusive anthology, including Richard Blanco and Caridad Moro, invited poets and writers both well known and emerging to address experiences of the physical and psychological act of being 'grabbed' without permission and the trauma that followed. In 92 staggering essays and poems, the contributors recount, often for the first time, assaults that are at once deeply shocking and shockingly commonplace, writing candidly, devastatingly, sometimes wittily. At the start, Alexandra Lytton Regalado recounts how, at age seven, while leaving El Salvador to start a new life in Miami, she was molested on the plane while seated right behind her mother and grandmother. Many works are stark accounts of violation and violence, others are lyrical (Rita Dove sets human brutality within nature's exuberance), musing (Hari Ziyad writes that "Soul-stealing doesn't have to happen via touch"), or slyly irreverent (Ana Men�ndez's "Puerto Rican Pussy"), and all eloquently and incisively protest a range of betrayals intimate and institutional, along with entrenched misogyny, racism, and prejudice against LGBTQ people. With a defining introduction by Joyce Maynard and a resounding afterword by Anita Hill, this is a universal and clarifying call to break the long silence that has imprisoned so many in pain and self-blame.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)