Late Loving
Photo illustration by Miki LoweBeing called a “domestic poet”—a chronicler of home life, of small, private matters—never sat well with Mona Van Duyn. The first female poet laureate, Van Duyn did write about love and marriage, but she was quick to push back against reductive labels. “It is a limiting term,” she once said, for a poet who “uses domestic metaphor to describe ideas, bizarre scientific developments, the possibility of nuclear destruction.