I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe

I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, edited by Susana H. Case and Margo Taft Stever, was published by Milk & Cake Press in February, 2022.

This anthology of poems on Marilyn Monroe, one of the all-time greatest iconic figures of beauty and femininity, addresses questions about gender roles and their enactment, and the ways in which women attempt to negotiate the differences between their private and public personae.

The ninety who are represented include Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, David Lehman, Denise Duhamel, Nin Andrews, Delmore Schwartz, Ernesto Cardenal, David Trinidad, and Frank Baez. The introduction is written by Lois Banner, the founder of the women’s history movement and author of ten books, including Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox (Bloomsbury, 2012). The anthology is for sale here.

The idea for the anthology was sparked by a December, 2020 reading that Susana and Margo gave, in which both poets read poems that mentioned Marilyn Monroe. The first publisher they approached, Milk & Cake Press, signed onto the project.

Margo and Susana, in consultation with the publisher, decided to donate any proceeds from the sale of the anthology to RAINN, the largest U.S. nonprofit that fights against sexual violence.

Initial readings were scheduled for February and March on Zoom at Red-Headed Stepchild, Poetry Society of New Hampshire, and Small Press Book Fair, among others, both in person and on zoom (see Upcoming Readings for more information),

SUSANA H. CASE is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently The Damage Done (Broadstone Books, 2022). Her books have won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book, a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite, an IPPY, and she was a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. She is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. (susanahcase.com).

MARGO TAFT STEVER’s latest poetry collections are The End of Horses (Broadstone Books, 2022) and Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019) which was a finalist and received honorable mention for the Eric Hoffer Awards, 2021. She is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and founding and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. She lives in Sleepy Hollow, New York. (www.margotaftstever.com)

Sunday, December 1: Poets on War and Peace Reading at Hudson Valley Writers Center. Featured poets include Susana H. Case, Don Krieger, and Hind Shoufani, with special guest, Wang Jiaxin. Organized by Cindy Beer-Fouhy and Margo Taft Stever. This in-person reading is free and is open to the public and will also be broadcast on Zoom (link will be posted here). Reading begins at 4:00 p.m. Read full article here: https://margotaftstever.com/2024/10/poets-on-war-and-peace-reading-december-1st-at-the-hudson-valley-writers-center

Wednesday, January 22, 2025: York County Senior College Gary Sullivan Lecture Series, Zoom poetry reading with poets Susana H. Case, Sandra Yannone, and Margo Taft Stever, 4:00 p.m. Curated by R. Jeffrey Goldsmith

Margo Taft Stever’s The End of Horses shows an important poet working at the height of her powers. “Treehouse” opens with lines that describe Stever’s poetry, in both subject and taut form: “Something about roots, / bone-like, tenacious, / that grip the moving ground.” Stever has always painted indelible portraits of the natural world—its violence and vulnerability, as well as its beauty. In this book, readers will see a deepening of her long eco-poetic project, and of her interest in the human animal, the tender and flawed human family alive on fraught Earth.

—Suzanne Cleary
Author of Crude Angel, BkMk Press of Missouri-Kansas City

The poems in Margo Taft Stever’s The End of Horses mourn our irreversible ecological change, in elegiac turns and odes to the beauty that remains. The speaker’s past is recast through a political lens, turbulent and haunting in retrospect. Stever’s ecopoetry emphasizes our enmeshment with tragedies we have created. Powerful, terrifying, and gorgeous, these poems are, above all, fearless.

—Denise Duhamel
Author of Second Story, University of Pittsburgh Press

Margo Taft Stever’s “‘Nothing about you lacked/ intensity,’ Margo Taft Stever writes in a poem addressed to her dead mother. The same could be said about the poems in Stever’s new book, The End of Horses. Whether directing her attention to the natural world, her own past, or the confounding aspects of society, her taut phrasing and incisive imagery are always invigorating, even (or perhaps especially) when her lyricism becomes tinged with a sense of unease—to the point, sometimes, that the images begin to feel like omens. The urgency becomes particularly acute in the poems about animals and their plight at the hands of humans, as she both records and honors ‘the almost gone, the forgotten.’”

—Jeffrey Harrison
Author of Between Lakes, Four Way Books

Six decades following her untimely death, Marilyn Monroe remains a muse. The actress and poet continues to inspire each generation’s dreams, imagination, art, and resilience. This collection runs the gamut with poems depicting her childhood sexual abuse, mental illness, dazzling and brilliant film career, support of civil rights, alleged and fabled relationships, and death. Monroe’s impact on our culture—and on each of us individually—is captured in this fascinating compilation.

—Gary Vitacco-Robles
Marilyn: Behind the ICON podcast; ICON: The Life, Times & Films of Marilyn Monroe, volumes 1 & 2; Cursum Perficio: Marilyn Monroe’s Brentwood Hacienda

I Wanna Be Loved by You—the perfect title for a renewed Marilyn coursing through the dreams of poets who still see the promise and the woe of her life, imagining themselves into what it was like for her to look for love and get so much of it that was not enough. They look for her blessing. They want to complete the life she left for all of us to imagine.

—Carl Rollyson
Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events; Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress; Female Icons: Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag