About this item
Highlights
- Poems in this volume bring readers through the construction site gate alongside the women who practice a skilled trade in a dangerous industry.
- About the Author: Susan Eisenberg is a master electrician with a master's degree in fine arts.
- 80 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
About the Book
Poems in this volume bring readers through the construction site gate alongside the women who practice a skilled trade in a dangerous industry. Assured and impassioned, the poems not only manifest outer events and day-to-day realities of the worksite...
Book Synopsis
Poems in this volume bring readers through the construction site gate alongside the women who practice a skilled trade in a dangerous industry. Assured and impassioned, the poems not only manifest outer events and day-to-day realities of the worksite but also expose through metaphor and resonant detail its high-voltage interior life.Susan Eisenberg's early poems were private responses to the experiences of her apprentice years as an electrician. When a collection of her poems was published in 1984, Eisenberg began to receive letters from her counterparts in other trades and other regions of the country. Her ensuing dialogue with a national community of tradeswomen inspired the poems in Pioneering.
Review Quotes
"A refreshing debut collection. . . . Susan Eisenberg makes economical, graceful, and good-humored poems from the struggle to win respect as a woman in a hazardous, male-dominated industry. . . . Pioneering illuminates textures of the working life that cut across countless occupations. . . . Eisenberg speaks with transfixing honesty and immediacy, importing into poetry a perspective from which we've heard too little."--Thomas R. Smith, Star Tribune
"Because these poems are moving and accomplished: full of grit, humor, awareness, invention, information, fellow feeling and political savvy, they avoid polemic or any self-indulgent emotion in a subject both politically and emotionally charged, even as they allow the reader to enter the experience of being a pioneer in a skilled labor field whose climate is almost universally hostile to women."--Eleanor Wilner, author of Otherwise
"Biting poems."--Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
"In Pioneering, Susan Eisenberg introduces us to a world and lives too little known through poetry. This is a powerful book filled with honest, unpretentious, fearless, and beautiful poems."--Thomas Lux, author of Split Horizon
"Personal and political, steeped in images of the trade and universally accessible, these poems are sure to appeal both to tradeswomen and to those outside of the industry."--Sojourner
"Pioneering captures individual stories in an emotional and compelling way."--Feminist Collections
"Pioneering convinces us that whatever may underlie the vexatious problems of sex and vocation, it is not lack of courage or ability."--Samuel C. Florman, New York Times Book Review
"Susan Eisenberg is the best kind of political poet--tough, plain-spoken, but alive to the human complexities that can derail the expected moral. She has learned her trade from real masters--Levertov, Snyder--and her pacing and alertness are unerring."--Alan Williamson, Author of Love and the Soul
"This book is great value.. . .It is a compelling ethnographic account of an unseen, unsung class of workers. . . "--Kristen Snow Spalding, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, April, 2000.
About the Author
Susan Eisenberg is a master electrician with a master's degree in fine arts. A widely published poet, a visual artist, and a long-term activist, she speaks and consults nationally on gender equity in the workplace. She is the creator of the touring mixed-media installation On Equal Terms: Women in Construction 30 Years & Still Organizing and author of Blind Spot and We'll Call You If We Need You. After working fifteen years on union construction sites, she taught creative writing for a decade at the University of Massachusetts. A Resident Artist/Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center of Brandeis University, she lives in Boston.