It's rare to read a collection of poems that doesn't call attention to itself as poetry. The twenty-five poems that comprise Helen Ruggieri's Glimmer Girls are smart and well-crafted, but because the language is colloquial and accessible and because the poet skillfully blurs the boundaries between the concrete and the figurative, it's easy to forget that you're reading poetry. The poems are thematically bound and accrue in meaning so that their cumulative power gives the work both strength and resonance.

These coming-of-age poems capture the world of adolescence with eloquence and heartbreaking accuracy. The setting is small town East Coast America in the 1950's. It is filled with Italian-American teenagers struggling with all the doubt, anguish and longing that adolescence is heir to. Vital, rebellious and sensual, these teens are driven by their hormones. The radio or juke box is always blaring with Elvis or Chuck Berry or Jerry Mulligan. The girls shimmy and bugaloo and polka. They sing in restaurants and dance at the Moose Club. They kiss and flirt and fall in love with boys who drive Caddies or Mercs or Olds. They learn to recognize their gifts or squander their opportunities. Some marry, settle down and have children, others go off to war, divorce or end up in dead-end jobs. Whatever the circumstance, Ruggieri explores it with deep respect, always aware that, even when they fail, teenagers grow up longing for something more than the ordinary.

Ruggieri's poems create a landscape in which girls practice becoming women. It is a world of spit curls and plucked eyebrows and twirling skirts, a world of dreams and disappointments, of chasing boys and being chased. The universality of the adolescent experience is rendered in these insightful poems with grace, ease and understanding. What a pleasure to read this book. What an honor to be able to linger in its world.