Helen Potrebenko is a feminist, but feminists don't always agree with her; she is a socialist, but the left is sometimes uneasy with her as any ally. As her new collection called Letters to Maggie (Lazara $8.50) makes clear, she also has no patience with the pretensions of the literary or academic world. "What I am most tired of in reviews,"; says Potrebenko in her letter Work and Literature, "is the incredible amazement afforded to working class and women's literature... Women and workers are, after all, property and property does not have the right to be heard. Literature belongs to the ruling class and they don't want it sullied by descriptions either of the lives of the workers or an indication of how the workers view their bosses."; 0-920999-34-4

[BCBW AUTUMN 1999]