A Working Girl Can't Win: and Other Poems [Paperback]

Deborah Garrison, whose work as an editor and writer has enlivened the pages of The New Yorker for more than a decade, evokes the characters and events of her everyday life with intense feeling and, more important, conjures up the universal dilemmas and pleasures of a young woman trying to come to terms with love and work."An intense, intelligent and wonderfully sly book of poems that should appeal as much to the general reader as to the poetry devotee."
--The New York Times Book Review

"With their short lines, sneaky rhymes, and casual leaps of metaphor, Garrison's poems have a Dickinsonian intensity, and the Amherst
recluse's air of independent-minded, lightly populated singleness. Many a working girl will recognize herself in the poems' running
heroine, and male readers will part with her company reluctantly."--John Updike

"Wry, sexy, appealing -- with a wonderful lyric candor."--ElleDeborah Garrison was born in Ann Arbor. She was educated at Brown University and New York University. She is now a senior nonfiction editor at The New Yorker, where she has worked since 1986. She and her husband and young daughter live in Montclair, New Jersey.The Firemen

God forgive me--

It's the firemen,
leaning in the firehouse garage
with their sleeves rolled up
on the hottest day of the year.

As usual, the darkest one is handsomest.
The oldest is handsomest.
The one with the thin, wiry arms is handsomest.
The young one already going bald is handsomest.

And so on.
Every day I pass them at their station:
the word sexy wouldn't do them justice.
Such idle men are divine--

especially in summer, when my hair
sticks to the back of my neck,
a dirtylÃ&