SOURCE: “Daring to Be Radical,” in Belles Lettres, Vol. 7, No. 3, Spring, 1992, pp. 51-2, 54.

In the following excerpted review, Dame offers a positive assessment of Long Walks and Intimate Talks.

It is refreshing, in these days of mean-spirited attacks on “political correctness,” to read the works of three women who are unabashedly radical—radical in the sense of examining the world from the perspective of those without power, security, or respect in American society. Two of these books are overtly political. Grace Paley’s Long Walks and Intimate Talks was intended as a statement “against militarists, racists, earth poisoners, women haters, all those destroyers of days,” while Karen Brodine’s posthumous Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking was published by the Freedom Socialist Party, to which she belonged when alive. Patricia Smith’s volume of poems, Changing Your Story, quietly explores the dynamics of a troubled, multiethnic, working-class family...