At Our Core: Women Writing about Power

Martz has made an industry out of editing and publishing affirming anthologies geared toward baby-boomer feminists (including the American Book Award-winning I Am Becoming the Woman I've Wanted). Her latest effort follows the familiar format of its predecessors, collecting essays, fiction, poetry and photography from a diverse pool of women. This time the theme is power (personal power, spiritual power, physical power, etc.), and the collection is likely to remind readers of Robin Morgan's trailblazing Sisterhood Is Powerful. Too many of the contributors lean on predictable pieties, as Sharon Nelson does in her poem ""Silencing"": ""A woman writer, simply by virtue of being a woman and a writer,/ is a renegade and a subversive."" Some, however, bite with irony, as do Lillian Nattel in ""Biology is Destiny"" and Honoree Fanonne Jeffers in her delicious poem (whose title encompasses 11 lines), ""A Haiku for Mr. Louis Farrakhan..."" Not surprisingly, given the spacious premise of the anthology, the contributions are all over the map. Yet at its strongest, Martz's collection will interest readers by virtue of its very eclecticism, a fact Martz seems to acknowledge in her introduction: ""After two years of reading more than 4000 submissions... I don't have definitive answers but I am more intrigued than ever with the questions."" 50,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo; editor and contributor tours. (Mar.)