The Sex of Art

The Sex of Art was Frances Presley’s first full collection, published by North and South in 1987. Perhaps a little overdue by that time, the book nevertheless summed up the author’s first dozen years of writing, and is a specific record of that time. A young woman begins with an American dream and the forms it takes in American writing. In this book she arrives finally in Ithaca, speaking in her own voice, and recognising the source of her dream in childhood travels to Holland, her mother’s country.

    Frances Presley subverts the imbalance between the sexes in her writing, through poetic form, ironic dialogue and narrative. She writes for a community in her own society, seen through all the possible conflicts. Women’s art is the focus of the title sequence and its climax the staging of The Dinner Party in London 

    This new edition revives the original volume as part of the Shearsman Library series, which is devoted to recovering significant out-of-print, or hard-to-find editions of modern poetry.