In Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (1998), Keith Tuma opens his discussion of Geraldine Monk (b.1952) as follows:

Tuma speaks to one of the difficulties involved in the criticism of women's poetry. The term ‘women's poetry’ suggests not only poetry that is by and for women but also poetry that is the articulation of women. Therefore, women's poetry is always being called on to be representative of something. Tuma also evokes another difficulty in writing about women's poetry: the assumption that experimental, feminist and radical can be comfortably elided. But identifying Monk's poetry as explicitly feminist has often been difficult. In his introduction to the ‘Some Younger Poets’ section of The New British Poetry (1988), Ken Edwards saw a convergence between Glenda George's championing of ‘womanism’ in order to avoid ‘the slur of “mere propaganda masquerading as literature”’ and the manifesto that Monk wrote with Maggie O'Sullivan which was published in City Limits in 1984. The two poets argued – in a passage that has since been endlessly quoted – that

Women's poetry that is explicitly feminist seems to run the risk of being called something other than poetry and the choices this leaves are stark. Women can write a poetry that is based on what Alan Robinson terms ‘rhetorical estrangement from the masculine poetic tradition’ (Robinson 1987, 208); that self-identifies as ‘womanist’; or that is simply ‘liberating’ because it is very, very good.

Our reading of Interregnum will argue that, because Geraldine Monk's book-length sequence is concerned with a linguistic sociality outside the dominant order (the Pendle witches), it enables a different focus on terms such as experimental, feminist and radical.