cover image Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women Writers on Cars and the Road

Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women Writers on Cars and the Road

. Faber & Faber, $24.95 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-571-19895-5

Nauen, who has written a collection of poems titled Cars and Other Poems and collected an anthology on women and baseball, has done a good job of pulling together another treasury of poetry, short fiction and essays on cars and the places they take us. There's an eerily evocative poem about a first speeding ticket by Debra Bruce, and an often hilarious account of learning to drive by Oona Short, who struggled to memorize gems from the learner's manual along the lines of ""A straight black line means this. A squiggly black line means that."" Nauen has included a variety of accounts of cross-country journeys by travelers ranging from Eudora Welty (whose mother kept track of mileage with an AAA Blue Book and a travel log) to the pot-smoking, hard-drinking narrator of Jayne Anne Phillips's ""Fast Lanes."" It's not always easy to distinguish between essays and short stories, and Nauen could have been clearer in her editorial apparatus. But she has selected some fine work, including poems by Louise McNeill, Lynn Emanuel and Pansy Maurer-Alvarez and essays by journalist Jill Amadio and writer/editor Leslea Newman. She has also chosen broadly, with one particularly memorable essay coming from Emily Post. Post, who drove from New York to California in 1915, offers advice to travelers that is still useful: ""Wear the thinnest and least amount of underwear that you can feel decently clad in, so as to get as many fresh changes as possible in the least space, because of the difficulty in stopping often to have things laundered."" How true. (Jan.)