This unique collection offers over one hundred poems from over one hundred poets in the only bilingual anthology of Vietnamese women's poetry available anywhere in the world. The poems in The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present range from some of the earliest oral poetry, the first Buddhist spiritual poems written by women, and bold works by today's youth. Whether it is the historical expulsion of the Chinese or the cultivation of silk worms, this volume speaks to the exceptional moments and everyday realities of women's lives, of love and war, work in the fields and cities, life in their homeland and abroad.