Boomer Girls

Book excerpt: Where 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 till 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, tinned auto-mobiles, and other household gods of their youth -- unite them in ways both hilarious and tender.