SOURCE: Clark, Kevin. “‘The Wife's Went Bazook’: Comedic Feminism in the Poetry of Ruth Stone.” In The House Is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone, edited by Wendy Barker and Sandra M. Gilbert, pp. 112-26. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Clark argues that the poems in Stone's Second-Hand Coat represent a sort of “comedic feminism,” in which Stone laces social commentary with humor.

In the tradition of American naturalism, the more recent poems of Ruth Stone's Second-Hand Coat: Poems New and Selected (1987) are always sociologically acute and often thin on hope. Stone's darkly feminist work employs humor to render the lives of people pushed to the margins of society by economics and gender bias. Encountering one of the relatives or friends who populate the pages of her poetry can be like encountering one of the squalid, unsheltered human beings who populate...