In Her Fifties tells two stories. The narrative portion is the story of "the fifties." The generation known for suburbia, the Cold War, the implacable authority of School. It tells a story of childhood both universal and individual.
The lyric poems section tells the story of a woman of a certain age, in her fifties, long married, beset by memory, buoyed by the sensory awareness of her world, the cottage at the lake, the garden, the ocean. Threatened by storms both natural and political, storms she can neither avoid nor ignore. These poems are "writing it down so the page / will remember for us when we forget" what it is to be here in this place and time.