IN THE LATE 1970s, I asked Karen Brodine to do a reading at a women's conference which I had helped sponsor at the college in southern California where I was teaching. She introduced herself to the class as "a workingclass lesbian poet." "For a long time," she said, "I didn't know what to call myself because I didn't have the words. Now I know."

There was stunned silence. She stood tall, in a white tailored shirt and black baggy pants before baggy pants were fashionable, in suspenders and slim tie. Then she read her poems quietly and purposefully for almost an hour: poems with clear images of a working, thinking, feeling, struggling, political woman.

In her audience were a few walk-in women from the community, but the rest were mostly students from my "returning women's" class, a group of women coming back to college after years of being cloistered in the house with their children.

Even though most were from middle class conservative homes, they had become used to hearing "nontraditional" women speakers every week in my class. But for most of these students, Karen Brodine was "more different" than all the other "different" women I brought into the class.

Among the evaluation forms that came back to me the following week, one confided, "I have been a wife and mother for nineteen years. Today, I am no longer a wife and the youngest of my five children is in high school and does not need mothering. I came into this class not knowing who I was. Now I know--Karen Brodine has given me the words."

Several wrote that they had never met a lesbian before and were "surprised". There were variations of that surprise: she looked so "normal," was so "nice," "feminine," and "even good-looking."

Others said they never knew poetry could be so direct and talk about such "mundane" subjects (like how a receptionist has to lie for her boss), never thought they were capable of understanding it, being moved by it or liking it. Until they heard Karen Brodine.

Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking is Karen Brodine's fourth and last volume of poetry, published posthumously by Red Letter Press, and partially funded by her friends and supporters. Most of the readers of this new collection will not be as naive as my students were more than ten years ago, but more than a few will find that she speaks for them, the disenfranchised, "...whose silence I turn to words."

These are political poems, for Karen was a committed and active socialist feminist who worked as a typesetter for many years, but they encompass a wider and deeper range of meanings than what is often thought of as "political."

Every 9 to 5 worker will see themselves reflected in her "work poems" in the opening section of the book, where Brodine captures the dailiness (or even "minuteness") of their lives "while we sell ourselves in fractions "with precision and, often, humor: "2 hours till lunch. / 1 hour till lunch./ 43 minutes till lunch. / 13 minutes till lunch. / LUNCH." She rails against the system that treats workers like commodities, uses their bodies and spits them "out the door at sixty-five." But through the anger and the bitterness at the conditions they are forced to work in, she never loses sight of the context in which we all live. The woman is working at a machine, but she is always thinking. "...think of it--our ideas whipping through the air /everything stored in an eyeflash / our whole history, ready and waiting."

Our own past and the pasts of older activist women are also placed into the context of "our whole history." There were her radical reformist grandmother, Harriet Pierce; her mother, Mary Brodine; and sister poet, the once-blacklisted Meridel LeSueur. We know that the arrangement and format of this book was carefully planned by the poet herself shortly before her death. And we can see, in the arrangement of these poems, that she saw herself as part of a continuum of the women activists she admired.

The final section contains some of Karen's last poems and are the most poignant. They speak with a sense of urgency. The spreading cancer in her body and the political diseases in our society are melded here into one: a clear warning. Yet these are poems of endurance and even hope though she had few illusions. In the exquisitely beautiful poem "Casino Window," the speaker, whose "body was deserting her," watches a wedding in progress from her hotel window six stories above. A "maverick northwest wind" turns the romantic scene into a somewhat comical one. Sounds from the "avalanche of coins" in the casino accompany the silent wedding scene. One senses a resignation, even reassurance, from the speaker that life, good or bad, will go on.

These poems reassure us that out of new ways of thinking, working, and living, new forms of life will be created: "remember that fish / that lives so deep/ it has grown its own light / energy glaring out the bulbs of its eyes."

Karen Brodine's poems glare out at us from the depths and dare us to think and act together.