Poetry. The prose poems in BALANCING ACTS straddle the delicate borders between fiction and poetry, memoir and fantasy, reality and illusion. The arrangement of poems chronicles the growth of one woman or a mythic Everywoman, from early childhood through adulthood and all that entails: school, love, marriage, and finally the mother's death and impending death of the father. In writing as in life, this poet seems to have no use for undue exuberance but is plainly too strong to let herself get bogged down in the maudlin...The result is honest and unaffected writing refreshingly free of the self-conscious angst that mars the writing of some of her colleagues--Library Journal.