The domestic image mutates: Mary Cassatt re-invents the Madonna in the space of the bourgeois household, a strategy that protects her radical focus on feminine experience from the dismissive forces embedded in the frame itself. She legitimates the domestic space, normalizes it as among the topoi of art, and makes us reconceive the term "women’s" when it is applied to art. It was from within that same bourgeois framework that Plath wrote her terrifying poems of motherhood and domestic entrapment. Plath’s voice is always already inside the domestic world, but she puts the reader outside of her entrapment and thus lets us see both the bee box and its raging contents. Both the painter and the poet conceive of domesticity in radical ways.
     Cassatt and Plath are Sarah Pazur’s foremothers. As they did, Sarah deploys the domestic scene. Its domesticity evolves from the demythologizing work of her predecessors, yet it enlarges their work. The voice of Sarah’s poetry speaks both from within the confines of domesticity and from a position outside of it. She manages to write from the position of the reader implied in Plath’s poetry through a precise and personal imagery. Her poetry embodies both the private vision and the constraints that empower its images. Sarah Pazur speaks the mother tongue.

             --Hugh Culik