reviewed by Bill Noble

An erotic poem may not actually be as great as really great sex, but it's better than a poke in the eye. Here are two passionate anthologies from two poles of the sex-positive world. Passionate Hearts is loving, sensual and erotic, happily heterosexual, and full of heat, lots of it from major poets. Between the Cracks is cheeky, transgressive, edgy, pansexual. Its writers come from the poetry world and from the fetish zines, but stretch to include Ginsberg, Michelangelo, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Bring condoms and a whip!

Here's a poem from Passionate Hearts, "The Surge" by Molly Peacock, that says those simple things we all feel but don't find words to speak. It starts out:

And here, in a first stanza from Kim Ly Lui Burton, is the condensed directness that poems can give us:

My opinion? This is the best anthology of erotic verse in print. Galway Kinnell paints transcendent oral sex on a rock in a lake in "The Last Gods." The well-known San Francisco poet Kim Addonizio magically mingles the juice-streaked flanks of a doe, two fawns, and the poet's breasts in "Alone in Your House." In "New Mother" Sharon Olds translates the gritty, half-terrifying intensity of first lovemaking after childbirth straight into the reader's body. My favorite erotic poet, Jane Hirshfield, in the title poem from one of her collections, "Of Gravity and Angels," gives us desire in an overwhelming erotic flood--

I want the long road of your thigh
under my hand, your well-travelled thigh,
your salt-slicked & come-slicked thigh

Here for contrast, from Between the Cracks, is Pat Califia in a poem about fisting:

Or Gavin Dillard in "Notes from a Marriage":

Or "On Being Fucked by a Talk-Show Panelist" by Ali Liebegott:

                          . . .squeezed into a cab/with the dyke porn star,/the lesbian stripper,/and the bisexual S/M top,/who when asked why she stays/with her boyfriend said,/"It's hard to find a guy/who cooks and cleans/and lets me sodomize him,". . .

You'll find some awful, and intense, poetry in this book, and some awfully wonderful poems, too. Here's a fragment of an exquisite poem by the amazing Jules Mann about masturbation. It's called "horse."

Knowing a little about the two editors of these profoundly different books might help. Wendy Maltz is a sex therapist from Eugene, Oregon. She says in her introduction, "Sexual interaction based on mutual caring and respect is very different from sex in which people are objectified and exploited. Loving, intimate sex can be far more enjoyable than impersonal sex...Sex is momentary, and sex is transcendent. That's the paradox." Her author photo is the girl next door grown up to woman, strong, sunny and smiling. Gavin Dillard is a "porn star, publisher, artist and photographer," shaven-headed and glaring from the back cover of Between the Cracks. Here's his take on our urges: "...sexuality is fraught with individuation...sexual anomalies are the rule and not the exception. As far as what we as a society choose to make perverse in our mores-du-jour, this is up for grabs."

You might consider erotic poetry as a cost-effective investment! Two books of dirty stories might provide thirty or forty occasions for delicious vaso-congestion, but these two books, if your sexual preferences can span them both comfortably, will furnish more than three hundred. Let's see, twice a day for six months, divided into...not bad, not bad!

Poetry is one of the ways we sing. And so is sex.

A call for submissions: Wendy Maltz will be publishing a second anthology of sexual poetry next year. Intimate Kisses has a deadline of Nov. 1, 1999. For guidelines, send an SASE to Maltz & Assoc., PO Box 648, Eugene OR 97440.