J. M. Wilson

Book of Anger: a Suite in Five Voices J. M. Wilson

The feminist scholar Kate Millet wrote that women are hungry to have their unspoken voices heard and to finally know the stories of their sisters and mothers throughout time. Author J. M. Wilson has sought out the sound of that voice, the Voice of a Woman, and in her groundbreaking play Book of Anger she feeds that hunger of women around the world to listen and be heard.
 
In Book of Anger, true artist of women's theater, storytelling and poetic prose, J . M. Wilson delivers an uncompromising view of the abuses and survival of females from childhood to womanhood. The shocking reality of the social casting of women as victims is challenged by her tales of women's inherent spiritual valor. Not merely a histrionic harangue, but a seductive melody of hope, Book of Anger tells the story of deliverance from the futile hopelessness of the victim to the passionate living woman who rises unconquered despite the attempted murder of her soul. In the tradition of Ntozake Shange's, "For Colored Girls ...."  J. M. Wilson has created a landmark piece of poetry in the round.
 
The craft and power of Book of Anger affirms the belief that there is still an audience for brutally realistic fiction as opposed to the manufactured products of "reality" that we are inundated with today. For Wilson makes it clear that, in the words of noted playwright Anna Deavere Smith, these stories, "are not offered as truths but as fictions that attempt to tell other truths, the kinds of truths that live in fiction and in the imaginary worlds."
 
Book of Anger fiercely questions bigotry based on color, race, sexuality, and gender, in extraordinarily evocative language and imagery to repay the reader and viewer's attention. This latest edition of Wilson's play features an introduction by award winning poet and Women's historian, Patricia Monaghan (acclaimed author of Goddesses and Heroines and The Red Haired Girl From The Bog)making Book of Anger a work not to be missed.