Women on the Verge

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AUG 2, 1999

Outdoorswoman and sports maven Rogers (Another Wilderness) chronicles yet another round of adventure stories about lesbians, involving river rafting, skydiving, rock climbing, racquetball and other activities. Interspersed among these sporty tales are slightly disjunctive pieces--in which a woman details her quest to become pregnant; a political protest goes awry; and a lesbian gets an anonymous phone call from two teenage girls--that are linked to the others only by the book's broad subtitle. Although Rogers asserts in her introduction that she sought to include "more of the complexity of life" beyond the eroticism that often defines lesbianism, many of these tales are deeply sexual, particularly B.K. Loren's gritty "Eye of the Storm," Judith Nichols's sensual "Naming and Other Tricks of Learning" and Marcia Munson's sex-driven "Burger King Baby." As it happens, the stories without a sexual element don't seem particularly lesbian. The best pieces--Gretchen Legler's bittersweet "Lake One, Lake Two...," Donna Steiner's lyrical "Connect the Dots" and Lucy Jane Bledsoe's ruminative "On Being at Sea"--explore interior landscapes laid bare by the challenges of the outdoors. Some pieces provide stunning visual moments: poet Eileen Myles gets lost "stalking" a volcano in the dark in "The Big Island." But despite glints of excitement, most of these tales lack narrative power: all are memoirs or episodic vignettes, and few have real direction or focus.