' Have you read the one about the angry women who laughed?'

How can the woman writer 'write angry', be 'at war with her lot' and not, to borrow from Woolf s consideration of this problem in A Room of One's Own, 'die young, cramped and thwarted'? In 'The Water Element Song For Sylvia' Wakoski is demanding more than mere survival, more than the lonely promenade along an empty beach which is the fate of too many 'liberated heroines' of the neo-feminist novel: