Grace Paley

Grace Paley (1922-2007) was born Grace Goodside on December 11, 1922, in the Bronx, to Jewish parents. Her work was mostly in short stories and fiction and she was a political activist. Paley’s approach was to make a dazzling verbal surface that doesn’t so much linearly represent the world as remind us of its dazzle. She liked to type at the kitchen table, right in the messy heart of family life, rather than cloister herself in a room of her own.

September

Then the flowers became very wild

because it was early September

and they had nothing to lose

they tossed their colors every

which way over the garden wall

splattering the lawn shoving their

wild orange red rain-disheveled faces

into my window without shame

— Grace Paley, from Begin Again: Collected Poems