[In the following review, Reedy examines the eastern American biases and upper-class assumptions that she finds in Women, Animals, and Vegetables.]

Maxine Kumin writes her stories and essays [in Women, Animals, and Vegetables] from the perspective of a well-heeled minor eastern American aristocrat; she is a “gentleman farmer” in all aspects of the term. As with most vocal animal rights activists, funding for her very expensive animal projects, especially horses, obviously comes from sources other than the piece of land that she inhabits, and she is quick to criticize animal owners who do not share her economic advantages, and therefore her philosophy. Her prose is meticulously politically correct, and from my perspective, that is, one who has butchered hundreds of chickens via ax and feels quite naturally balanced about it, she's a bit too “gushy.”

In “Have Saddle, Will Travel,” Kumin is “cursing absentee animal ownership” in the “depleted, if not dead” Texas landscape when she and an acquaintance rescue a stuck llama. As a fourth-generation western American, I found myself resenting these assumptions about people and circumstances she has only observed superficially while on a lecture/reading tour. Westerners have suffered this form of “drive-by” ridicule ever since easterners (Owen Wister, Ned Buntline, et al.) invented the “western.” She and others of this ilk treat the West as if real people with real economic concerns don't live here. Contrary to advertising hype, the West is NOT merely a playground, nor are our arid areas “wastelands,” nor are all of its inhabitants unenlightened boors.

I too am a writer/poet, but my words are not idylls celebrating the emotional foibles of a leisured class who can afford to “get away” and have “contacts” in exotic places to ease the grieving process (“Solstice”). Some of us believe we must stay put and hold our universes together or lose what little the system has allotted us.

Kumin's fictions are the most powerful section of this collection. And since they are coupled with essays, the reader wonders how much is “real” autobiography in spite of the crafty arrangement of events and dialogue. She is a gifted “nature” writer, but to celebrate her subjects as representative of contemporary American life is to whitewash the totality of the experience and, in my opinion, contributes to blaming and dismissing the disenfranchised, the poor, the homeless—who exist BECAUSE of the very economic structures that feed Kumin's purebred horses.

And what does Ivy League name-dropping mean to those of us who are either self-educated (due to the wonders of the intellectual “equalizing” nature of our national library system) or can only afford state and/or community college educations? The mere fact of the existence of this beautifully produced book dangerously crowds out other, perhaps more authoritative, rural voices. Women, Animals, and Vegetables, regardless of its inert literary quality, perpetuates the false myth of generalized American affluence.

Of Kumin's stories, I liked “Beginning with Gussie” best—maybe because my own recent experiences have rendered me sensitive to lineage, love, and procreation. And at least in this story, Kumin isn't having one of her silly conversations with “Mr. Ed.”

I don't want to be mean-spirited. Kumin's book is all right; it just doesn't sing to me in terms of my own lower-class struggles with life, love, survival, education, etc. And ultimately, what do stories, poems and essays matter since most of America sits mesmerized by the blue hum of television pap? It's just that I want literature to mean something again. I keep hearing Lawrence Ferlinghetti's voice thundering in my head, “I am waiting for someone / to really discover America / and wail” (“I am Waiting,” These Are My Rivers 101).