All American Girl (Pitt Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Robin Becker (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Following the thread of her sexual identity through a web of memory and history, Robin Becker tangles with questions of lesbianism, Jewishness, and relationships in her third book of poems, All-American Girl, winner of a 1997 Lambda Award. In the process she holds up Peter Pan as a drag idol, contra dances with farm wives in Robert Frost's New Hampshire, celebrates Yom Kippur in New Mexico, and mourns her sister over roast chicken. To Becker, the "innocence" of the 1950s becomes a lens with which to view her own lessons of experience.

Becker's dominant role is the exuberant observer, the all-American girl of the title. In "Too Jewish" she defends her choice not to get a nose job, while remembering her sister's eagerness to "march/ before the knife, the gleam of good marriages/ in her prescient eye./ My sister only wanted a date," as if one "could fix a problem/ by cutting it away." At other times in the book, her poems consider their subjects with a distanced and ironic sensibility reminiscent of W.H. Auden, as in her poem "Solar," in which a speaker meditates on the sexual identity of a landscape:

The desert is butch, she dismisses your illusions
about what you might do to make your life
work better, she stares you down and doesn't say
a word about your past. She brings you a thousand days,
a thousand suns effortlessly each morning rising.
She lets you think what you want all afternoon.

These are her best poems. They achieve a wonderful sense of negative capability, considering multiple viewpoints without grasping for the easy observation. Nothing is cheap in Becker's poetry, not even the dimestore lipstick in "Dreaming At The Rexall Drug," where the speaker finds, in the memory of watching her grandmother shop for makeup in 1955, a reason to lament her own mortality: "as far as I know, everyone will live forever." Becker, an associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, revels in exposing kitsch as the skeletal structure of modern memory, and puts a lively sense of prosody at her service.

From Publishers Weekly

In her third collection, Becker (Giacometti's Dog) presents a washed out, chiaroscuro portrait of the lonely woman, whose lover "...is beautiful and/ sees beauty where I see sadness..." Readers, too, may search for moments of beauty, but Becker holds them at bay. These poems focus on the lesbian trying to fake it in a heterosexual milieu, the suicide's sister, the traveler hoping to fit in somewhere?from the 1950s Philadelphia of her childhood, Italy, France, New Mexico, Wyoming. Ultimately, this volume is more about leaving than loving; the speaker of the final poem considers "how my life has been a flight/ from family, and how I've arrived/ at middle age without one." The poems are intense, and a few ("Port-Au-Prince, 1960" and "The Ribbon") are stirring, but too many focus on similar events from similar emotional perspectives, leaving readers ultimately unmoved.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (February 8, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822955806
• ISBN-13: 978-0822955801
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #282,419 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite book by Robin Becker, July 18, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: All American Girl (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

I read a considerable amount of contemporary poetry, but I only discovered Robin Becker during the last year. I was amazed by her poems. This is a poet who is struggling to write about whatever glimpses of truth she can find, not settling for easy answers or arresting, but ultimately hollow, metaphors or symbols. Additionally, one must consider that many gay or lesbian poets either seem to write primarily about their sexuality, or they attempt to keep that autobiographical fact out of their books (for fear of being cast by readers as being solely a "gay poet.") Even in the literary world, I think that ambiguity makes many readers nervous. Any poet facing the decision about whether to reveal his or her homosexuality in print knows (and quite possibly fears) being pigeonholed because of sexual orientation. Becker's work is ambiguous (or, more clearly, complex) only in that she chooses to focus on many different subjects, with her lesbianism being one of many subjects from which she gleans meaning. Thus, she cannot be categorized neatly. For any poet, such uniqueness is almost always a compliment, and it definitely is one in her case. I read all of Robin Becker's books this summer, and each (with the exception of her first collection, included in *Personal Effects*) had at least a few poems that were amazing and will remain in my memory forever. However, if I had to choose a favorite book, I would pick this one. The sheer quantity of highly successful poems in this collection makes reading *All-American Girl* a very rewarding experience.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An incredible collection by a great poet., July 28, 2001

By 

Aeleen Frisch "aeleen" (Wallingford, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All American Girl (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

This collection of poems by Robin Becker is truly wonderful. Her poems range from funny and ironic, to deeply moving, to acute (if sometime oblique) social critique. Her topics range over a wide range of concerns (as noted in the description above), but she is a poet, plain and simple, not a lesbian poet, Jewish poet, and so on. Her insights are her own, from her own specific perspective.

To me, the most amazing thing about this collection is the high level of quality maintained throughout. While not every poem is a "home run," there are not fly balls or grounders either: none of the filler stuff that is all too prevalent in books by established poets.