Ms. Aligned: Women Writing About Men

MS. ALIGNED is one of the few contemporary collections devoted to writing by women about men. The contributors represent a diversity of cultures and ethnicities, and the stories they tell in their fiction, poetry, and nonfiction are complex—sometimes being about family, sometimes about society, and sometimes about country. A fable describes the physical and psychological transformation of a man, challenging our understanding of what it is to be human. A story set in the Hawaiian Islands satirizes the expectations that people bring to romantic engagements and how these are shaped by our stereotypes of men and women. A poem describes the brutalization of a father and the ways in which this affects his family. Another poem recounts the life of a man who was torn between living in the West, where he was free, and returning to his homeland, where a civil war raged. Included in MS. ALIGNED are commentary by the contributors and works of visual art that have further stories to tell.