Drawing on the recently introduced system of film ratings, Kennedy described "Armed Love" as "XX rated". Lerman describes her experience of youthful fame as "devastating"—not as a result of Kennedy's criticism, but rather from the burden of notoriety it created: The "double X" warning made me briefly notorious and from the Sunday morning that review came out and then on for a long time, my phone didn't stop ringing. You have to remember this was 1973; still the hippie years, with disco and the club scene on the horizon. The gay bars around Sheridan Square and down on West Street were packed. If you were Andy Warhol or various other notables of the time, who better to have on your arm than a twenty-one-year old poet who dressed like Cher and had just been named by the venerable 'New York Times' as a literary outlaw? I got invitations to go everywhere with everybody--but the problem was that in reality, I was a pretty much uneducated, inexperienced Jewish kid from the Bronx with an admittedly nasty streak, but I was scared to death of all these people. I stopped answering the phone. Her fame also led Lerman to become acquainted with some of the leading literary figures of the time, which had a daunting effect on her morale: I ended up meeting some of the day's most important writers including Donald Barthelme, Richard Stern, Philip Roth and Tom Pynchon (all still very important, extraordinary writers, I must add) and while they couldn't have been kinder to me and more helpful, I was scared of them too. I thought, I'll never be able to do what these guys do. Although Lerman published a second book in 1975, she eventually withdrew from her literary career and undertook a more conventional life with marriage and (nonliterary) job. Much later (2001), her career as a writer resumed when Sarabande Books commissioned her third volume of poetry, "The Mystery of Meteors". She reports a second "rescue", long after the first by her high school teacher; this was "by my current publisher Sarabande, who asked me, after a decades-long hiatus, if I'd like to try to write poetry again. It turned out that I would." A steady stream of work has since followed, along with a variety of forms of recognition. Her fourth book, "Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds", won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 2006, given by the American Academy of Poets and "The Nation" magazine.