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A compendium of poems celebrating the wisdom and experience inherent in living a full lifetime of laughter and learning with a lick of license (poetic and otherwise).  I hereby reclaim this word and declare it to mean: a free woman, unencumbered by the opinions of other and the stricture of tradition or worn-out customs.  One who can be counted on to have devised, through trial and error, a strong internal ethic. One who can be trusted to say what she means and mean what she says.

For many women, a cloak of invisibility seems to wrap us in thicker and thicker layers of obscurity as we move into old age.  I wrote this book as a protest to that erasure- as a reclamation of the rich, exciting, intensely alive time of life a woman experiences as she enters her fifth decade and begins to consider what comes next.  It is full of paradox.  The needs of elderly parents, dramas of adult children, contrast with the exquisite freedom to be oneself.  “You Can Tell a Crone by Her Cackle” celebrates the many nuances in the lives of ‘women of a certain age.’  I felt deeply awarded by a neighbor to whom I gifted this book when she said, “You were writing about me! Every poem told my story.”

Buy this book for your mom, your aunt, your sister, yourself, but also for your dad, brother, husband, son, who are rarely privy to how women experience later life, and even less, what we think about it all.