A Working Girl Can't Win: and Other Poems

This is very good poetry: insightful, articulate, and very witty. Garrison is quite deft with the English language and doesn't litter her writing with clever, irrelevant tricks. She keeps her work focused and to the point. She has the snap and sting of Michael Benedikt.

I can't imagine not being able to identify with these poems. To me, they embody the essence of being an almost-thirty, underachieving married woman with an overactive imagination. Garrison has put into words the underlying meaning of my everyday life. The poems drip with insecurity, guilt, lust, skepticism, fear and hope. She is full of paradoxes: questioning yet assertive, pessimistic yet hopeful, bright yet unmotivated. What I like best about these poems is their underlying bitterness, but it is a bitterness that is presented with humor and understanding. Nothing turns out like you thought it would, and people continue to disappoint you, yet still you never cease to be amazed by this phenomenon. Every day provides a fresh slap on the face of your idealism. If life gives you lemons, you might not be able to make lemonade, but you can still make toxic Kool Aid. Just don't drink it.

Read a review in Newsweek and immediately bought my copy. Rings very true to the things that I am feeling about my own life, career, and friends. I hope she publishes more of her poetry. This has also reawakened my interest in poetry, which I forgot about since the 8th grade!

I read almost this entire book this am on the train while on my way to work. I am so thrilled to see the work of a generation x-er (perhaps on the baby boomer cusp) like myself who is so full spectrum- honest, humorous, contemplative, strong, vulnerable, contradictory and therefore, human.I absolutely loved it. Not so much "Plath" like, but maybe more "Sharon Olds" without all the dick.

The peoms read so easily and yet there is not a single person I have read them to that has not been inspired by them in some way. She seems to be able to really hit something that we all feel and she makes it seem so easy.