About the Author

Stephanie Strickland is the author of a volume of poetry entitled Give the Body Back and has published poetry in The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Ironwood, and Prairie Schooner, as well as other journals. She has won several poetry prizes and writing fellowships, which allow her to continue her work on the impact of scientific and mathematical language on bodies, especially women's bodies and the earth itself. She is a librarian at Sarah Lawrence College

Reviews

". . . such a powerful and engaging effort: Weil comes alive again to the reader, in all her feisty, haunting singularity. A wonderful evocation!"--Robert Coles, author of Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage

"Like a lamp carried up a lane at night, The Red Virgin carves a sure path to the life and work of Simone Weil, bringing us into intimate contact with one of the great unavailing religious and social thinkers of our century. It is a splendid book of illuminations."--Edward Hirsch, author of The Night Parade

"Stephanie Strickland's book-length sequence gives us a vivid and fascinating portrait of a woman whose short life, as well as writings, represented a tremendous moral force for the post-World War II generation and remain relevant for us. She comes through as a brilliant, erratic ascetic, utterly uncompromising and always at odds with the world--a burning, difficult saint, if saints were still in fashion. Strickland's kaleidoscopic approach allows her to enlarge biography to touch on questions of faith and justice, which were life and death questions for Simone Weil. This is a memorable, extraordinary book."--Lisel Mueller, Brittingham Prize Citation

"This book of poems, dazzling in their brilliance, presents Simone Weil in the fullness of her life as a woman, as a political protestor, as a spirit responding with intelligence and honesty to the pain, the inhumanity, the dishonesty of life in the twentieth century. Strickland explores Weil as the daughter of a Jewish family dedicated to honoring genius, as a radical resisting Germany's invasion of France and France's exploitation of colonized people, as a soul searching for love and refusing compromise, as a soul searching for God and refusing compromise. And Strickland does all this in poems haunting for their beauty. This is a book feminists have long waited for."--Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, University of Pennsylvania

The concept of a book of poems based on the life of Weil (1909-1943) is intriguing. But excitement fades after reading a few pages. Biographical poetry, if it is to succeed as poetry, must reach beyond mere biography. Poet and subject must merge to express insights that might not be historically documented but are all the more valued for that very reason. Strickland ( Give the Body Back ) falls short on all counts. No speaker takes center stage, making it difficult for readers to locate themselves. Weil's own words, ``actual or paraphrased,'' are italicized, but the two are not differentiated. In addition, there are passages from books and letters by J. M. Perrin, G. Thibon, Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein and others. Strickland's own voice is perhaps the most muddled of all. In a poem aptly titled ``How You Are Withheld from Me'' she begins: ``Diffidence? Both of us. You raised / on some banner: the cerebral, intransigent / fragments of your life-- / your papers not published, not / together.'' By turns she addresses Weil, presents a personified voice of her subject and attempts a dialogue, forcing Weil to participate in this inanity. (Dec.)

". . . such a powerful and engaging effort: Weil comes alive again to the reader, in all her feisty, haunting singularity. A wonderful evocation!"--Robert Coles, author of Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage

"Like a lamp carried up a lane at night, The Red Virgin carves a sure path to the life and work of Simone Weil, bringing us into intimate contact with one of the great unavailing religious and social thinkers of our century. It is a splendid book of illuminations."--Edward Hirsch, author of The Night Parade

"Stephanie Strickland's book-length sequence gives us a vivid and fascinating portrait of a woman whose short life, as well as writings, represented a tremendous moral force for the post-World War II generation and remain relevant for us. She comes through as a brilliant, erratic ascetic, utterly uncompromising and always at odds with the world--a burning, difficult saint, if saints were still in fashion. Strickland's kaleidoscopic approach allows her to enlarge biography to touch on questions of faith and justice, which were life and death questions for Simone Weil. This is a memorable, extraordinary book."--Lisel Mueller, Brittingham Prize Citation

"This book of poems, dazzling in their brilliance, presents Simone Weil in the fullness of her life as a woman, as a political protestor, as a spirit responding with intelligence and honesty to the pain, the inhumanity, the dishonesty of life in the twentieth century. Strickland explores Weil as the daughter of a Jewish family dedicated to honoring genius, as a radical resisting Germany's invasion of France and France's exploitation of colonized people, as a soul searching for love and refusing compromise, as a soul searching for God and refusing compromise. And Strickland does all this in poems haunting for their beauty. This is a book feminists have long waited for."--Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, University of Pennsylvania