THOSE OF A SENSITIVE DISPOSITION, who might require trigger warnings, should perhaps avoid the work of Anne Bradstreet, usually hailed as the first American poet, a colonist who arrived in Massachusetts with her husband from England in 1630, possibly reluctantly. Though touted by her publisher as a “gentlewoman”, her political poetry was far from gentle.
It sits uneasily with the ideal of the woman writer — either in the 17th century, when women were supposed to be plying the needle not the pen, or in today’s era of intersectional feminism. It’s hard to swallow her robust take on
