Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0877456879 ISBN 13: 9780877456872

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 1999

Synopsis

Where were you between Betty Crocker and Gloria Steinem? With that question in mind poets Pamela Gemin and Paula Sergi began collecting the poems in Boomer Girls, an anthology of coming-of-age poems written by women born between 1945 and 1964, give or take a few years on either side. The answers to that question fill this volume with the energy, passion, heartbreak, and giddiness of women's lives from childhood to adolescence to middle age.

The poems in Boomer Girls are by unknown, emerging, and established writers, women who participated in the second wave of feminism. From Sandra Cisneros' "My Wicked Wicked Ways" to Barbara Crooker's "Nearing Menopause, I Run into Elvis at Shoprite," from Wendy Mnookin's "Polio Summer" to Kyoko Mori's "Barbie Says Math Is Hard," these poems call for us to celebrate (in the words of poet Diane Seuss-Brakeman) "glances, romances, beauty and guilt, regret, remorse, rebates and rejuvenations."

Boomer Girls share a common culture, bound by their generation's political history, by pop icons like Barbie—that pedestaled Boomer Girl who's just turned forty—and by the music that's never stopped playing: Janis Joplin, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, the Ronettes, Van Morrison, Patsy Cline, John Lennon. The Boomer poets in this feisty anthology speak with diverse voices and embody a wide range of experiences, yet their generation's universal images—the hula hoops, TV shows, finned automobiles, and other household gods of their youth—unite them in ways both hilarious and tender.

About this title

About the Author

Pamela Gemin teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Her first book of poems, Vendettas, Charms, and Prayers, was a Minnesota Voices Project winner and is forthcoming from New Rivers Press.

The author of two poetry collections, Brother and Phantom Limb, fellow Boomer Girl Paula Sergi teaches creative writing at the Arts Center of Fond du Lac.

Review

“This rich anthology tracks boomer girls from birth to, well, knowingness...Their poems are about loss, loneliness, violence, and love. The writers in Boomer Girls touch themes that all generations experience but this generation can express for all of us—in ways that quietly-bred Emily Dickinson, say, never could—what it is to be a girl baby, then adolescent, then woman growing up in America.”—Susan Stamberg, NPR's “All Things Considered.”

Edition details

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0877456879
• ISBN 13: 9780877456872
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 252
• Editor: Gemin Pamela, Sergi Paula