[Miss Wakoski's] poems are professionally supple and clear and often feature a kind of sardonic humor, but their pervasive unpleasantness makes her popularity rather surprising. One can only conclude that a number of people are angry enough at life to enjoy the sentimental and desolating resentment with which she writes about it. Notable among her themes is an anti-male rage that seems the opposite of liberating: Miss Wakoski isn't mad at men who oppress her, she's mad at men who fail to fulfil her exacting romantic fantasies. "I could no more give up my idea of finding the perfect man than I could give up poetry," she writes in an oddly defiant introductory essay. "Are they not the same concept, the same spirit, the same holy quest, for beauty…?"

The eponymous subject of ["The Man Who Shook Hands"] is a fellow who took leave of the poet after a night together by shaking hands, a lapse in erotic etiquette brooded on so obsessively that one keeps expecting it to hatch something, but it never does….

Nor does Miss Wakoski show the least inclination to sisterly feeling. All her many heroes are male. Her hatred of her mother is expressed with hair-raising harshness. Her repeated railings against fate for making her (in her own eyes) physically plain suggest a crude sexual competitiveness assumed to be in the nature of things. The last line in the book is "How I hate my destiny," and ultimately irritating is the level of consciousness Miss Wakoski brings to her troubles, a level high enough, one would think, to trigger some growth or extension, or at least some rueful laughter. But perhaps she would regard any such transcendence as a betrayal of her "holy quest," which, as a result, goes nowhere. (p. 15)