Women's changing roles and images in poetry

This collection contains poems that depict and insinuate women in a variety of roles, from subservient housewife to liberated professional, from seductress to CEO, from people-pleaser to outspoken hussy. These are historical images of women through the ages. Shakespeare's idealized and romanticized vision of Cleopatra is juxtaposed with the plight of the working mother who teeters on the brink of exhaustion trying to be both responsible parent and capable professional. In "Night Waitress" by Lynda Hull, she thinks of the unpleasant features of her job "that make me stare out the window or want/to try every bar down the street." Returning after work in the morning, she sees men going to work but is too exhausted to talk to anyone. She recalls her Slavic mother who "washed the floor on hands and knees below the Black Madonna" and wonders whether her...