Are You Judging Me Yet?

This collection of lyric essays by award-winning poet Kim Moore explores the dynamics of performing poetry as a female poet – confronting the implications of being a female on public display, with the connotations of sexual objectification, in a context that traditionally disregards the body.

The book draws on her experiences of writing and performing the poems in her second collection All the Men I Never Married. It is a balance of memoir, academic treatise and poetry, though the author’s emphasis is on writing in a popular way and making the subject accessible to a wide audience. To achieve this her models have been Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Sarah Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life.

The book’s subjects include heckling at poetry readings and other interactions; problems with the ‘male gaze’ and what the ‘female gaze’ might look like in poetry; ‘guilty for being a man’: how guilt can be useful if it can bring about change; how writing poetry about sexism can shed added meaning to the term; the objectification of men and women, and ‘bad faith’ arguments.