Reviewed by Susannah Indigo
(8/16/00)

Beneath June's firm breasts, Absalom keeps his eyes closed. The rosy nipples are erect. [The mother] is getting goose bumps. With a shiver, she thinks to herself: "My daughter is in heat." Fascinated, she keeps watching ... There's June, her June, calmly kissing Absalom's trousers. Down to the knees. Suddenly, she grabs hold of his white-hot penis and slips it under her skirt with no formalities...

Her nipples, hard and dark, took on magical colors, and Lucas could stand it no more. He took off his clothes, put a little bit of resin on his pelvis, on his pubis, and on his penis. As he opened the drowned woman's legs he felt the stinging head of that viscous unguent, felt himself burn. With his fingers he loosened her vulva, and right there, on the workshop table of grafts and woods, he penetrated sweet Aurelia, Aurelia of ambers and resins, his beloved little whore, to be able at last, at last to fill her with heat.

Paul Theroux -- whose book My Other Life is easily in my top ten books of the past few years -- has a delightful story about a man involved with a woman who is in love with her cats, a woman who explains her theory of orgasm as: "Step one, chase the cat up the tree. Step two, let it worry for a while. Step three, rescue the cat." When she failed to have an orgasm she would whisper, "The cat is still up the tree - get her down."

Jane Hirshfield, a goddess of writing inside, outside, and all around poetry and meaning, particularly in her book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering The Mind of Poetry, offers a poem with a lovely image of a woman in an eighteenth-century Indian painting, closing with the elegant phrasing: Under the silk of a sari so fine it could pass through the hoops of her earring, her nipples are standing.

Amy Bloom, whose short-story collection Love Invents Us is also on my favorites-list with Theroux, offers a touching story about a woman who is painting the inside of a synagogue with her married lover, Jack -- a lover who happens to be terminally ill. They make love during the day of painting, and later she answers a friend's shock with a gorgeous statement of love: I said no, I didn't want to shock God (what would have shocked God? two more naked people, trying to wrestle time to a halt?), it was just where we were. And if someone had offered me the trade, I would have rolled myself in paint and done dripping off-white cartwheels through the entire congregation for more time with Jack.

Yellow Silk II consists of forty stories and poems, and it is Pond's very personal vision of erotic writing. Some critics have said that the long-standing Yellow Silk editorial policy of "all persuasions, no brutality" dismisses the large and widely-accepted community of BDSM, and many in that community might point out that they consider themselves masters of many persuasions, whips and clamps notwithstanding. But I believe there is plenty of room for multiple visions of erotic writing, be it Susie Bright's Best American Erotica series, the Jewish vision in The Oy of Sex, the committed-relationship vision in Herotica 6, or the very wet vision offered in the new Aqua Erotica. I like Robert Mapplethorpe; I like Yellow Silk; and I find no conflict between those tastes.

The only direction I want to see erotic writing take in this new century is to move onward and upward and further into the mainstream. Perhaps on the day I find that there are more erotic books in my local Barnes & Noble than Chicken Soup/Self-Help/How to Lose Ten Pounds/Get a Man books, maybe then I'll think there's enough. I believe that erotic writing is a fabulous source of subliminal "self-help," gently offering fantasies and ideas on how to live more fully in your sexual identity. To read these books is to create your own vision of the world through a haze of sensuality and eroticism, and I know that when we all master this art of passionate and seductive living, our world will be a far better place.