Customer Reviews

Dyke Hands and Sutras Erotic Lyric

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"Dyke Hands & Sutras Erotic & Lyric," by SDiane Bogus, is an outstanding work from this prolific African-American lesbian writer. A collection of poems and essays, "Dyke Hands" covers a wide range of the author's diverse interests: spirituality, eroticism, cultural politics, love, and the struggles that come with being a writer.

The book is divided up into four sections: "Spirituality," "Race and Culture," "Love, Joy, Sex, and Loss," and "Selves and Selfhood." Each of the four sections begins with several poems and concludes with one of Bogus' characteristically witty and insightful essays. From a diversity of her own materials, Bogus has thus constructed a unified and satisfying whole.

Bogus' poems cover a broad range of themes and poetic styles. Some standouts include "The Creator's Dalliance: Psalm 3," a playfully rhyming deconstruction of gendered concepts of deity; "Michael Jackson," a painful meditation on the public image of the celebrated entertainer; and "Making Whoopee," a highly erotic description of a lesbian sexual encounter with another Black woman.

Equally engaging are her four essays. The best of the quartet are strongly autobiographical. "The First Temptation of an Arrogant Christian and a Fledgling Buddhist" is a revealing memoir of the author's own spiritual journey, and of her quest to integrate her lesbian sexuality into that journey. The final essay, "To My Mother's Vision," is a stunning memoir of her birth as a poet during a fertile period of African-American cultural production in the 1960s and 70s. Containing Bogus' reflections on her encounters with such important African-American literary figures as Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, and Dudley Randall, this final essay is a wonderful resource for students of Black literature.

"Dyke Hands" will be of particular interest to those interested in the art of poetry and of the essay, as well as to students of lesbian literature and African-American culture. SDiane Bogus writes, "I personally advocate for the good, just, right, truthful, faithful, and an appreciation of the beautiful." With regard to that goal, "Dyke Hands" is a trumph.

I bought this because it was highly recommended in the books by Tee Corinne `Courting Pleasure', `The Body of Love' and `Dreams of the Woman Who loved Sex' - I figured it was a 'not to be missed book' and so it is.

Taken from the author's introduction - `This collection of my work will offend some because it walks the line between crude and refined, reverence and disrespect, between the secular and the spiritual, sexual repression and sexual expression, but it's that very line that lesbians tightrope walk everyday of their lives'.