It's true, there are many types of contemporary poetry -- narrative, lyric, beat, dada, surrealist, prose, experimental, etc. To sum up the poetic style of Deborah Garrison, I would call A Working Girl Can't Win confessional narrative poetry. More specifically, I would call it poetry for the Ally McBeal set.
Personally, I did not like this collection at all. I think it got rave reviews from publishers mainly because Garrison is one of their own; she is currently poetry editor for Alfred A. Knopf, and a senior editor at Pantheon Books.
I did not find anything "poetic" in these poems, except for sentences clipped in random places to make them look like verse, along with some very forced rhymes that made me cringe. For example, these lines from "An Idle Thought":
I'm never going to sleep
with Martin Amis
or anyone famous.
At twenty-one I scotched
my chance to be
one of the seductresses
of the century . . .
There is no great meaning or sentiment expressed, no insight into human nature, and no innovative turns of phrase that, to me, are absolutely CRUCIAL to making some lines of "thought" into a "poem." Instead, we are given details of a NYC-girl's sexual misadventures, along with complaints about how tough life is as a working girl in a big city. For example, these lines from "Please Fire Me":
. . . Do I have to stare into his eyes
and sympathize? If I want my job
I do. Well I think I'm through
with the working world,
through with warming eggs
and being Zenlike in my detachment
from all things Ego.
I'd like to go
somewhere else entirely,
and I don't mean
Europe.
If you're into pop confessional narrative, and haven't really graduated past teen angst poems, then go ahead and pick up a copy of A Working Girl Can't Win. If you, like me, prefer poetry with substance that makes you stop and think, give this collection a miss.
