This essay explores how working-class lives are represented in the poetry of three American women poets, Jan Beatty, Sandra Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman. It discusses how the poets’ working-class backgrounds affect their poetics and their perceptions of poetic craft. Through analysis, I show how their poetry shares a sense of defiant resistance, communicated through imagery of violence, labor, and sexual pleasure, responding to societal and institutional limitations placed on working-class women and working-class women writers.
