To Make Baking Powder Biscuits by KateLynn Hibbard
One of the most famous villanelle poem’s is Dylan Thomas’ Do not go gentle into that good night, with the repeated lines “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” A contemporary take on the villanelle form is KateLynn Hibbard’s poem To Make Baking Powder, with its fire-related words stove, burn, stoke, hungry baking up some subtle feminist rage, felt by a subservient wife of the settler colonial era in midwest America, when gender role restrictions limited women’s opportunities and choices.