Uppity is the girl you want to sit with at the popular kids table in the cafeteria. She sassy she's smart she's funny she's &ndash well she's uppity! Uppity will have a legion of fans because she would order a U-Haul truck for her senior prom chauffeured by a tuxedo-tee-shirt driver.
Kathi Wolfe is one of America's great satirists at a time when few women humorists are writing poetry. We champion her poetic will and many of us faithful Kathi fans follow her columns in D.C.'s newspaper The Blade to see how she transforms as she reforms.
Kathi Wolfe is a writer and poet. Her chapbook The Green Light was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013. Wolfe was a finalist in the 2007 Pudding House Publications Chapbook competition. Her chapbook Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems was published by Pudding House in 2008. She is a contributor to Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability an American Library Association Notable Book for 2011 and a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Poetry Anthology-Fall 2011.
Wolfe's poetry has appeared in Gargoyle Beltway Poetry Quarterly and other publications. She has appeared on the radio show "The Poet and the Poem " received a Puffin Foundation grant and been awarded poetry residencies by Vermont Studio Center.
In 2008 Wolfe was a Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow and a winner of that year's (Washington DC Transit Authority/Arlington County VA) Moving Words Poetry Competition. She is a regular contributor to the LGBT news­paper "The Washington Blade" and a Senior Writer/Columnist with the arts magazine Scene4 (www.scene4.com).
"Here is an excerpt from Kathi Wolfe's book. A poem titled 'A Pulp Fiction' begins:
All those lesbians you pal around with will lead into a blind alley her
grandmother told Uppity. For the love of Sappho Uppity thought slipping on her silver pumps
take me there! Bring me to this dyke-infested place where
sapphic ghosts kiss blindly in devil-encrusted glitz. Where forbidden fruit
ripens...
Uppity is the girl you want to sit with at the popular kids table in the cafeteria. She sassy she's smart she's funny she's &ndash well she's uppity! Uppity will have a legion of fans because she would order a U-Haul truck for her senior prom chauffeured by a tuxedo-tee-shirt driver.
Kathi Wolfe is one of America's great satirists at a time when few women humorists are writing poetry. We champion her poetic will and many of us faithful Kathi fans follow her columns in D.C.'s newspaper The Blade to see how she transforms as she reforms.
Kathi Wolfe takes wit to a higher arc in her column in Scene4 Magazine. But I want to talk about her alter ego 'Uppity.' Here we find the epicenter of memory and imagination. The inherent strength in these poems is a freeing up of taboo subjects with intellectual arguments camouflaged as stories and a summative bravery of writing with originality.
Only a gifted poet could take a character situation and plot and make such a relationship with the reader that will not be forgotten. The comfort of poetry is in the surprise and discovery of the new. Of all the tools the poet has in her bright art none surpasses the jaunty elegance of Kathi Wolfe's 'Uppity.'
Here is the first part of the poem 'Seeing Red':
"How do you explain the color red to a blind person?" The Little Book of Big
Questions.
Forget about wheelbarrows filled with hay
and cows grazing in the fields outside barns
they're cozy but too bucolic
to dance in the retinas of unseeing eyes.
Don't chase after matadors with their flowing capes
fainting fans and baiting of crazed bulls
this butting of horns and gory frenzy
disturbs the dreams of shadowed corneas.
Skip cherry cough drops and Valentines with doilies
such elixirs stink of Victorian parlors
and the flu. Sip a Bloody Mary slowly carefully
seeking solutions to all puzzles in the tabasco ...
To read the rest of this poem and be thrilled with more just sit back light up a beer put up your feet and take the joyride of your life with an outrageously incorrigible uppity blind girl."-Grace Cavalieri producer/host "The Poet and the Poem " Library of Congress
"Wolfe's chapbook The Uppity Blind Girl Poems is a picnic celebration a reunion of spirits a new beginning a rising sun. A world that isn't consumed by its own blindness. One that dines with the green-eyed monster but avoids its fanged bite where you are your own puppet you pull your own strings and where a cane is a cane. Even the love poems are uncomplicated and pure. Lovers connect at the mind' eye bake lasagna massage headaches away and a sister's Valentine that names Uppity thief brat and witch declares in the end 'there would be no light if not for your dark coven.' Wolfe claims seeing isn't for the faint of heart but if some of us find courage we will see the world as Wolf sees one still hopeful despite destruction and capable of an enduring humanity. The great mastery of The Uppity Blind Girl Poems is that it sees what the rest of us usually miss but beckons us to see anyway and not look away." -Venus Thrash, author of The Fateful Apple
"Introducing Uppity Blind Girl: sassy saucy sexy a gal like none you've ever met. Invoking beers and bellinis cinema synaesthesia Grace Kelly and the Hepburns (Audrey and Kate) Kathi Wolfe takes us on a sapphic journey silk and stilettos to boot through which both the 'sighted and unsighted emerge into the light.' A different vision arises witty and vibrant through the sightless eyes of this 'Braille Carrie Bradshaw... blindista.' She's on the hunt for requited love and she's wise as Tiresias. Look out world: contrary to her protestations Uppity is ready for her close-up." -Moira Egan
