SOURCE: "The Poetess: Duel, Sigh, or Shrug?," in The Village Voice, Vol. 17, No. 51, December 21, 1972, p. 26.

In the following excerpt, Weller discusses Wakoski's poetry in regard to gender roles. The critic applauds Wakoski's treatment of the subject and declares that The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems addresses "the anxieties, fantasies and paradoxes which many women would rather hide."

[Today] as in the days of George Eliot, one of the highest compliments a woman poet or novelist can receive is: "Reading her work, you wouldn't necessarily know she was a woman." It's curious and encouraging, then, that Diane Wakoski—a poet who, through her own hard sensuality, has always been rescued from a gender typecast she herself has had contempt for—has achieved, in these highly personal poems of love and betrayal a very sharp distillation of the contemporary female sensibility with all its cultural baggage and contradictions. With a fury and...