Aug 30 2015

Stealth review of The Steerswoman series, discovered via search for poetry.

Rosemary

You remember Mary Alexandra Agner, right?  I’ve mentioned her before:  Science writer and poet — I signed up as a buck-a-month patron of hers on Patreon. 

Mary sent out an email recently to her Patreon patrons, alerting us to the fact that she had two poems in the January issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone.   CSZ is a print-form (as opposed to online) literary quarterly, with reviews and essays and poems, with a particular interest in the works of women writers.  Although the physical version costs physical money, CSZ is nice enough to put PDF copies online for free, six months after the original publication.

So naturally, I clicked over and started scrolling down to find Mary’s poems.  But before I got there:  a review of the Steerswoman series, by none other than SFF author Kate Elliot.

Not to keep you in suspense: she likes it!

I found it a really interesting analysis, bringing up aspects I hadn’t thought of before, while highlighting some of the things that I especially do try to accomplish with the series.   I’m so pleased.   Kate is an intelligent, deep-thinking person.  I was most recently impressed with her one-person presentation at Worldcon this year on Narrative Structure and Expectation (alas, I came in late, about when she was talking about the example of modern society’s ingrained expectations of what Cleopatra was like, as opposed to what she was really like…).

So, surprise!  A review  I didn’t know about.   You can pop over and read it, and take a look at Mary’s poems, as well.    (Kate is page 6, Mary is page 15.)