Pioneering - Paperback

by Susan Eisenberg (Author)

Poems in this volume bring readers through the construction site gate alongside the women who practice a skilled trade in a dangerous industry. Assured and impassioned, the poems not only manifest outer events and day-to-day realities of the worksite but also expose through metaphor and resonant detail its high-voltage interior life.Susan Eisenberg's early poems were private responses to the experiences of her apprentice years as an electrician. When a collection of her poems was published in 1984, Eisenberg began to receive letters from her counterparts in other trades and other regions of the country. Her ensuing dialogue with a national community of tradeswomen inspired the poems in Pioneering.

Author Biography

Susan Eisenberg is a master electrician with a master's degree in fine arts. A widely published poet, a visual artist, and a long-term activist, she speaks and consults nationally on gender equity in the workplace. She is the creator of the touring mixed-media installation On Equal Terms: Women in Construction 30 Years & Still Organizing and author of Blind Spot and We'll Call You If We Need You. After working fifteen years on union construction sites, she taught creative writing for a decade at the University of Massachusetts. A Resident Artist/Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center of Brandeis University, she lives in Boston.