Description: These poems -- accessible, poignant, funny, and original -- tell the story of a young woman's progress and predicaments. Devolving in part from the shock of a father's untimely death, they are saturated with life. Deborah Garrison, whose work as an editor and writer has enlivened the pages of The New Yorker for more than a decade, evokes the everyday characters and events of her life with intense feeling, and, more important, conjures up the universal dilemmas and pleasures of a woman in her twenties trying to come to terms with love and work. Firemen lounging in a fire station flirt with her, and though she's married, she's not immune to their charms or her own longing: "As usual, the darkest one is handsomest./The oldest one is handsomest./The one with the thin, wiry arms is handsomest...And so on." In one poem she and a friend stay up all night and indict the men in their lives; in another she skewers the way women who succeed at work are viewed: "Is she the woman/they courted for her youthful edge/or a kiss-and-tell bimbo, /a careerist coquette?" She's equally critical of herself, after staying late at the office, for not being "half/of what I meant to be./Among other things, the mother/of three."

As the unique table of contents suggests, this book has an overall narrative are which makes the whole even more satisfying than its splendid parts. The new paperback edition of Working Girl guarantees a wider audience for one of the most appealing and accomplished young poetic voices in this country.

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