On a Grey Thread is the groundbreaking poetry collection of Elsa Gidlow – the first in North American history to openly express lesbian desire.
Both personal and political, Gidlow’s poems express the poet’s complex feelings as a young woman whose political ideology and sexual identity ran counter to the traditional values of her time.
Opening her collection with “The Grey Thread,” Gidlow expresses herself with ornamental imagery, decorating her drab existence with the colorful beads of her personal identity. Employing the double meaning of “gay,” offering a brief erotic “moan” on the precipice of enjambment, Gidlow stretches her stanza to its sinful conclusion, recalling Eve’s temptation in the Garden of Eden.
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