It Happens As We Speak -- a Feminist Poetics

The personal, the poetic, the political, the historic, the mythic -- they braid together in this saga of the growth of a woman's mind. Pat Falk's story is unique, and at the same time she is Everywoman. It Happens As We Speak is a book of birth, and life, and change, and wisdom.
Alicia Ostriker

Pat Falk's rare pastiche of memory and lively literary analysis gathers a momentum so persuasive that we catapult from page to page with the shifts and turns of her life as they affect her twin lives of scholar and poet. A riveting mix of candor and musing.
Molly Peacock

An intriguing account from the trenches of decades of coming to consciousness as a feminist reader, writer, and member of the literary community. A moving read for those who were there and those who want to know what it was like, and a lively resource for those aiming to understand feminist poetics.
Annie Finch

What's particularly important about Falk's book is that it is an ode to the art of writing and the art of reading from which it is born. It affirms the value of literary art to one's inner life, of poetry as a means of spiritual enlightenment.
Daniela Gioseffi

From Reviews of It Happens As We Speak: A Feminist Poetics

Fascinating, quest-like, moving around in an unknown landscape. Patricia Monaghan, author of Red-Haired Girl From the Bog

I read the book in one sitting, I was so moved by it. Most important, it's about the process of discovery. It's about questioning and working toward change. Her personal transformations become her best teacher about poetry, especially showing what it means to write as a woman. Pramila Venkateswaran, author of Thirtha llege.

It is a mixture of non-linear biography. Tumbling from Adrienne Rich to Charlotte Bronte and back again, Falk explores the inner workings of why a scholar makes her choices and how a poet can feel that her life is both endangered and rescued by the art she practices.
Molly Peacock, author of Cornucopia

A mixture of nonlinear biography, poetry, literary criticism and symbiotics. Falk uses a mixture of previously separated writing forms to cross what she sees as an arbitrary line between the personal and the professional in writing. Each category informs the other in a way that carries forward the thoughts of the writer.
Ian Wilder, Long Island Pulse

A prototypical vehicle for travel through interior space.
Daniela Gioseffi, author of Women On War: International Writings from the Feminist Press.