Woman Prime
Poems
by DiMaggio, Gail C
70 p., 6 x 9
Format: Paper
Price: $14.95
2018
A woman is a series of shifting possibilities.
The frame that contained her
in the morning can transform into
something completely different by afternoon.
The roles she’s called on to
play mutate over the years and throughout
a lifetime. And her very place in
the world is called into constant negotiation.
In this swirl of contradictions,
finding her own self—her core—can be
a bewildering journey. Woman Prime is
about the fundamental human wish to
settle into an authentic self, a “prime”
identity. It follows one woman through
her roles—child, adult, wife, mother—
and shows how she must remake herself
through each new stage.
Like many women, the speaker believed
that leaving her parent’s home,
falling in love, and raising children
would reveal the essential core of herself.
Instead, she learns that those she
loves can fail her and that she must embrace
a world full of flickering and conflicting
expectations for women.
Gail C. DiMaggio is a writing teacher and poet living in Concord, New Hampshire. Her
work has appeared most recently in Salamander, Slipstream, Tishman Review, ELJ, and
Magma.