"For six decades, her writing confronted the traditional stereotypes of the female body, how it should look, weigh, and be desired. She was, to my eye, the real sexual liberator of the sixties — a woman who wrote dangerously, lived wildly, and loved daringly, right up to her very last breath. [...] Diane di Prima knew firsthand what it was like to make a seat for herself at tables that had no space for women like her — women who challenged the system, and who thrived in the act. She was always in coalition with such women, and you can hear echoes of her work in the "fight the patriarchy" slogans of modern feminism. She ... was raised by the women in her mother’s family to understand that men are just "a luxury," not a necessity for women's survival. To survive in this world as a woman, she learned, was to live in a state of insurgency, and to make peace with that fact. ... She saw herself as a weapon to be deployed — no, detonated — against her oppressors. She wrote about the equality of the sexes. She wrote about women as wolves, women as predators, as hunters, as villains. She wrote about fat women, queer women, androgynous women, disobedient women, women as Gods, as birds, as the wind."