ROCK ‘N’ ROLL BROKE INTO MY LIFE when a teenage girl older than I blasted Bo Diddley on her record player. She was a dishwasher with curly hair. I heard the music come out of her bedroom window and could not get it out of my head. Later, at school at lunch hour in the gym when guys danced with girls, I heard Carl Perkins and I haven’t been the same person since. I had grown up on folk music and on rhythm and blues—I played Leadbelly records everyday for a year—and rock ‘n’ roll sounded in my ears as though it had come out of black bars, the black ghetto, and the juke joints of the South. Soon after the British Invasion of the 1960s, when rock ‘n’ roll bands such as the Beatles and the Stones, came to the States, I went to England and lived with an American who played the guitar and sang the blues in British pubs. When I came back home and started teaching literature, I attended rock concerts on campus with tens of thousands of students and heard The Beach Boys, the Jefferson Airplane, and other bands. Mostly, I listened to rock ‘n’ roll with others, rarely by myself, and often in the company of women, many of whom show up in these poems and to whom I mean to remember and to pay homage. Moreover, I wrote these poems explicitly for the purpose of performing them in public and so I have paid particular attention to the sounds of the words on the page. Hopefully you’ll hear music in the background even when you read this work quietly at home. About thirty women show up in Rock ‘n’ Roll Women plus one man. I didn’t want to leave men out completely; some might say that the one man I have included isn’t a very good example of American manhood. To that I would say, I am not trying to provide good examples of anything. Rather, I aim to capture a specific person, place, and time from the 1950s to the present day when I’m still likely to listen to rock ‘n’ roll on CD or on radio stations such as KWMR that broadcasts from Point Reyes Station in Marin and that must know that I’m listening and that there are others out here beside me who want to hear rock ‘n’ roll, too. Rock 'n 'Roll Women comprises a series of snapshots that set relationships against the pleasing perspective of the jukebox. The love affairs may have tarnished but...Otis Redding will eternally suggest the possibility of youthful optimism and Raskin distils something of that appealing spark in these brief cameos.--Simon Warner, Beatnicity , May 2012 Rock'n'Roll Women celebrates both rock and women equally and with great good will. Its 25 brief poems follow a simple formula like the guitar, bass, and drums of a rock trio: a woman (well, 24 women and one man), a rock artist from any era, and a moment in time defined by its soundtrack.--Mariann G. Wizard, The Rag Blog , March 14, 2012 Jonah Raskin has been writing poetry since the 1950s, when he went to high school, played football, and listened to rock 'n' roll-like the Beat Generation writers, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg whom he admired and aimed to imitate. He is the author of American Scream, a biography of Ginsberg's poem Howl, and the author, too, of six poetry chapbooks: More Poems, Better Poems; Bone Love; Public Places, Private Spaces; Auras; Jonah Raskin's Greatest Hits; and Letters to a Lover. Raskin has also written a number of books including The Mythology of Imperialism; Out of the Whale; The Weather Eye; Puerto Rico; Homecoming; My Search for B. Traven; For the Hell of It; American Scream; Natives, Newcomers, Exiles, Fugitives; The Radical Jack London; and Field Days. Raskin's latest book, Marijuanaland, was published in 2011. He lives in Santa Rosa, California.