The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Paperback)

by David Lehman (Editor)
Key Phrases: Lifting Belly

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Lehman's cheerfully eclectic, determinedly accessible and defiantly sex-positive collection—a savvy extension of his successful Best American Poetry franchise—marches from an unlikely beginning (On a Young Lady's Going into a Shower Bath by Francis Scott Key), past Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, through the modernist era (Conrad Aiken's truly sexy Sea Holly) and on to the present, where poets male and female, gay, straight and bisexual, describe bodies and pleasures in an array of verse forms. Sestinas abound; Lehman also finds a villanelle, a pantoum, a brace of sonnets and, not surprisingly, lots of swinging free verse. Lehman's best choices give off both heat and light: Dennis Cooper remembers the aches of eighth grade; Maggie Wells's Sonnet from the Groin approaches her own sex organs with bounce and honesty; and Bernadette Mayer's echoic couplets in First turn to me... evoke the lucky days at the start of a great romance, when sexual wishes are commands. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Description
There is a deep tradition of eroticism in American poetry. Thoughtful, provocative, moving, and sometimes mirthful, the poems collected in The Best American Erotic Poems celebrate this exuberant sensuality.

These poems range across the varied landscapes of love and sex and desire -- from the intimate parts of the body to the end of an affair, from passion to solitary self-pleasure. With candor and imagination, they capture the delights and torments of sex and sexuality, nudity, love, lust, and the secret life of fantasy.

David Lehman, the distinguished editor of the celebrated Best American Poetry series, has culled a witty, titillating, and alluring collection that starts with Francis Scott Key, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Hart Crane, encompasses Frank O'Hara, Anne Sexton, John Updike, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, and Sharon Olds, and concludes with the rising stars of a whole new generation of versifiers, including Sarah Manguso, Ravi Shankar, and Brenda Shaughnessy.

In a section of the book that is sure to prompt discussion and further reading, the living poets write about their favorite works of erotic writing.

This book will delight, surprise, and inspire.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (February 5, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416537465
• ISBN-13: 978-1416537465
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #40,659 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A feast between the covers (of the book, that is)!, March 9, 2008

By	Robert A. Caldwell (Jackson, TN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Hardcover)

This book is indeed a feast between the book covers, and reading the poems will make you want to dive under the covers with your beloved! My copy has been in my hand only a month, and already the pages are becoming dog-earred and the highlighting is prominent. Many anthologies of erotic/love poems contain so much similar material, but this one introduces the reader to many fine but often too little considered erotic poems and poets. Therein lies its greatest value, at least to me. The enthuiastic introduction by editor David Lehman is alone worth the price of the book. I am confident that readers will join me in eagerly looking for a second volume in the near future. In summary, I have the very highest praise for this good anthology, as it has helped me to write better erotic poems. I give this book 5 stars, with a cherry on top!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, Sensual Anthology, June 15, 2008

By	Marion "[e-mail]" (Louisiana) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

I checked this book out from the library and after renewing it twice, I figured I ought to break down and buy it. And I did because, happily, it's out in paperback.

Readers, this book was/is NOT a waste of money, no sireeee. It's loaded with passion, veiled hot passages, steamy yearnings, wit, angst, lust/love and even a funny poem that made me laugh out loud. My copy is hilighted and dog-eared and indispensable.

I even sent a spanking new copy to a good friend for her upcoming birthday in July. (Don't buy this book if you're a reviewing friend of mine who loves poetry....you know who you are! LOL!) It's winging its way to you even as I write this review.

Anthologies are the way to go. This one is like a ten course meal with the finest wine and deserts. Buy it, read it, praise it to every poetry lover you know.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT COLLECTION! ADD THIS ONE TO YOUR LIBRARY SHELVES!, November 16, 2008

By	D. Blankenship (The Ozarks) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Hardcover)

I am normally not a big fan of poetry anthologies, as I much prefer poet specific work, but in this case I will have to make an exception and very much recommend this little offering. This volume contains over 130 works, and includes such poets/authors as Frances Scot Key (love his "On a Young Lady's Going into a Shower Bath"), Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson (you cannot beat the eight lines in "Come slowly - Eden!" #211), Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Millay, Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath and many, many other well known writers, as well as many, many not so well known.

The introduction by David Lehman, is a work within itself and if it were longer, would be worth reading as a separate volume.

Some of these poems are good, some not so good and few....! Now that being said, I am a very strong believer that poetry is completely a matter of taste. If I do not like a specific work, that does not make it bad in any way or form. Likewise, if I find a poem that I think is the beginning and end of all great poetic work that does not mean that the man or women setting next to me will roll their eyes back in complete despair and never read another line of that particular author again. As I said, I very much feel that poetry, like art, is a selfish thing and to each his own. But you're talking to a guy here that likes the poems of Kipling, Browning, Thackeray, Longfellow Yeats, Servant, and yes, even Rod McKuen...no snob here!

This is not a book filled with a bunch of dirty ditties, nor is it a collection of work that you would find on just about every wall of every truck stop restroom in the country. This is not a book filled with nasty, but funny, limericks nor is it filled with poems that are so vague that most readers would have problems figuring just what the poet or poetess was talking about.

What this work is, is a collection of erotic poem dating back to 1980 and working through the present. Quite a number of styles and forms are used here, from the formal, to the ode, to the sonnet, and to free verse (the more modern offerings are more free verse than the rest; big surprise, huh?) and the subject matter covers the entire gambit from illicit love, to gay, lesbian, marital, casual encounter, and unending and enduring love and lust. I liked and enjoyed the variety. I did note, and I think this is why an anthology works so well here, that women are in general better at this genre than are men; more sensitive, and indeed, more graphic. I also noted that the minds of the man or woman of over 100 years ago was just as erotic as that of those today, actually even more so in many ways, to my way of thinking.

Anyone interested in this sort of work could do worse than this volume. I am glad I have this one on my shelf.

Don Blankenship
The Ozarks