Handmade Love, by Julie R. Enszer. A Midsummer Night’s Press, 64 pages, $11.95 paper.
There is nothing coy about Enszer’s poetry. With seductive clarity, she celebrates sexuality – her own, that of other women, and of men. In “First Kiss,” she yearns to kiss another teenage girl. In “Jade Ring,” she fantasizes about warming a woman’s “bold stone” with “my wetness down below.” In ”Morning Pant,” she imagines “the shimmer of gloss from a woman’s juices on my chin.” And in “Stroke,” about her friend Michael’s sudden frailty, she writes, “…the only strokes I wish to hear of are the ones that lead inexorably to orgasm.” There are politics, too, in these poems: “When We Were Feminists” is a lament for an activism enfeebled by the passage of time. And there is affection for late friends: in “Couplets for Jeff,” about a man who died alone at home at 42 and not, as Enszer would have wished, “…mid-orgasm with some little twinkie”; and in “Cunts,” dedicated to Tee Corinne, “who enabled me to see lesbian love and cunts in color.” There is indeed nothing coy here, and everything that is powerful about poetry.
by Richard Labonte
