Maxine Kumin was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and writer, a US Poet Laureate who also became well known as a feminist voice in literary circles. This is her memoir. As she died in 2014, its publication in 2015 is newsworthy. Kumin's prose is straightforward, clear-eyed and thoughtful. She documents her life as she reflects on it as a product of her place and time, in which a pawnbroker's Jewish daughter could become first a 1950's middle-class white housewife with children, then a famous writer-professor with a skiing hobby and a farm retreat. To contemporary readers in times more generous to white and Jewish women, the indignities on her way forward may seem harsh, though Kumin would rather simply tell the story than bewail it. This quality may also endear it to readers who feel that for the present generation of American writers of any gender, such comfortable endings are unlikely. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com) Read Less