The Actualist Anthology Book

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.