Matthew Holman is an associate lecturer in English at University College London. His first book, In Favor of One’s Time: Frank O’Hara and the American Century, is in preparation.
The writer Barbara Ehrenreich, who died earlier this month, believed in a humanistic Marxism. Nowhere was this conviction more on display than in her writings on the sexism and cruelty of America’s for-profit health care system.
Diane di Prima’s political poetry took on America’s oppressive power structures while her activism made her a target for the FBI. A new edition of her work shows that we are still fighting the same battles as di Prima.