All American Girl

by Robin Becker

Winner of the 1996 Lambda Book Award for Lesbian Poetry.

“With poignancy, honesty, and grace, Becker contends with the messy implications of her lesbian sexuality, Jewish identity, and sister's suicide. . . . Becker is acutely aware of, and devastated by, her many losses, but emerges defiant and admirably without regret or shame.” —Boston Review

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Robin Becker (born 1951) is an American poet, critic, feminist, and professor.

Becker earned a BA and MA at Boston University. She taught for many years at the MIT before returning to Pennsylvania in 1994, where she is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women's Studies at Penn State.

Becker is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Tiger Heron and Domain of Perfect Affection. Her All American Girl won the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in Poetry. In 2000 she was honored with Penn State's George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, and she served as Penn State Laureate in 2010-11. Other honours include fellowships from The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies of the City University of New York, The William Steeple Davis Foundation, the Mary Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Becker’s interest in narrative springs from her family background, including a childhood spent listening to her grandmother’s stories, learning from her the nuances of storytelling and her family’s history in Ukraine. Becker was also greatly influenced by the women writers whose poetry was available in the 1970s, including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, and Susan Griffin. Poet Stephen Dunn regards Becker as achieving “what may be one of the early twenty first century’s most difficult accomplishments—to write a credible poetry of affirmation. In the doing, she doesn’t pretty up the world. Rather, she finds language that embraces our dualities, our many-selved presences, regularly demonstrating her kind of perfect affection.”

Reviews

[Hannah Barnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Becker's poems tell a story of heartbreak and peace-finding. I loved how small nuggets of each story/event she was talking about were woven through different poems, making it necessary to read all of them to get the full picture. I think I will need to revisit this collection sometime in the future.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are certain poets I read and I’m immediately in awe of their wisdom, which I define as the ability to take their specific existence and make it resonate with my life. When I read Robin Becker’s The Horse Fair, I noted the wisdom that it was filled with and now this collection confirms that she is among that class of artists for me. Throughout these tales of a Jewish lesbian’s life of relative affluence, I found a fierce intelligence and self-examination that was wholly relatable. These poems are dense, philosophical musings about class, gender and all the other categories that we as humans crave in others, yet ache to break out of ourselves. Becker anchors these deep musings with concrete details and the occasional jolt of irony (“Quaker Meeting, the Sixties, 22-23), as well as touchingly human moments, like two girls giggling through their first meditation class (10). I feel so fortunate to find poets like her, and she is definitely one I will continue to follow after this program, just as much for enjoyment as for the inspiring craft work that she displays.

[Jillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robin Becker has bestowed on me a new respect for semi-formalism and, ironically, for lesbian writing, which in my experience is mediocre at best. But Becker writes with professionalism and wisdom, and also with a self-awareness bordering on self-deprecation, saved, though by her mastery of semi-formalism, her willingness to flirt with imagistic and linear sentimentality. I agree with what, I think, Richard Hugo said: if you are not risking sentimentality, you are not close to you inner self. This closeness to self, to all human selves, is the attractiveness of Becker's poetry--her unblinking honesty, her fearless intimacy, which includes her explicit lesbian references. I want, though, to differentiate her from the genre of "lesbian literature." Said genre has acquired to the connotations of pure eroticism or extreme affirmation to the detriment of literary quality. Becker is first a poet and connects that thread of attention to me in a way few "lesbian authors" can.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite poems from this collection are Solar, A History Of Sexual Preference, and My Grandmother’s Crystal Ball.