From Publishers Weekly
Martz has made an industry out of editing and publishing affirming anthologies geared toward baby-boomer feminists (including the American Book Award-winning I Am Becoming the Woman I've Wanted). Her latest effort follows the familiar format of its predecessors, collecting essays, fiction, poetry and photography from a diverse pool of women. This time the theme is power (personal power, spiritual power, physical power, etc.), and the collection is likely to remind readers of Robin Morgan's trailblazing Sisterhood Is Powerful. Too many of the contributors lean on predictable pieties, as Sharon Nelson does in her poem "Silencing": "A woman writer, simply by virtue of being a woman and a writer,/ is a renegade and a subversive." Some, however, bite with irony, as do Lillian Nattel in "Biology is Destiny" and Honoree Fanonne Jeffers in her delicious poem (whose title encompasses 11 lines), "A Haiku for Mr. Louis Farrakhan..." Not surprisingly, given the spacious premise of the anthology, the contributions are all over the map. Yet at its strongest, Martz's collection will interest readers by virtue of its very eclecticism, a fact Martz seems to acknowledge in her introduction: "After two years of reading more than 4000 submissions... I don't have definitive answers but I am more intrigued than ever with the questions." 50,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo; editor and contributor tours.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Martz, Papier-Mache Press' founder-publisher, built this niche--subject-focused anthologies of observations from relatively obscure women--and her previous entries (
When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple, 1991;
I Am Becoming the Woman I've Wanted, 1994;
Grow Old Along with Me, 1996) have won multiple awards. Here, an essay by Adelphi University communications professor Elayne Rapping challenging "The Media's Unfortunate `Victim/Power' Debate" --"a falsely binary, either/or trap in which we are either terminally imprisoned or miraculously `free at last!'" --sets the terms for the 56 stories and poems and 15 photographs Martz chose (from more than 4,000 submissions) as samples of "real women trying to make sense out of complex issues [in this case, power] while they tend to the business of living." The authors vividly consider the relationship between power and education, violence, friendship, sexuality, self-reliance, community, age, and spirit. Active promotion linked to National Women's History Month is planned, so libraries where Martz's other anthologies have circulated will want to add this one.
Mary Carroll
