I Was a First Alto in the 1980s

An astonishingly insightful and deeply felt collection of poems that meditate on time and the many stages of a woman’s life—from girlhood to adolescence, from being a young wife and mother, to seeing your children grow up and depart—by the celebrated poet and bestselling author of A Working Girl Can’t Win

“The strength of Garrison’s poems is their ordinariness, in both language and subject matter. They are not pretentious. They speak to the reader directly: this is a conversation with a likable next-door neighbor.”—The New York Times

Deborah Garrison broke open the doors of poetry with A Working Girl Can’t Win, a collection The New York Times called “a highbrow analogue to Sex and the City,” and then spoke profoundly to a changed post-9-11 world as she wrote of raising a family in The Second Child. Now she returns with an extraordinary new collection, inviting readers into her poems again in her conversational style like a wise, welcoming friend. But beneath this seeming simplicity is a recognition that is far from simple, for each poem in these pages investigates the most elusive element of our lives—the slippery power of time, and how it shapes our perception of who we are.

The poet is a girl, innocently reaching for the adult novels on her parents’ bookcase; in a blink, she’s a college singer; then she’s a young wife in the city, late for work. She’s a mother at the kitchen sink, overhearing her daughter studying with her boyfriend; she’s in the hospital holding her own mother’s hand in her final days. Past eras collide in poetry’s eternal present, as Garrison candidly illuminates a woman’s most private moments, giving them language and meaning while revealing the startling beauty of life itself. Taken together, the poems of I Was a First Alto in the 1980s show why Garrison is a treasured American poet, one of exceptional intelligence and literary gifts.