Poetry. A box of prosodic bonbons with exploding centers, offering the burst of intensity only artificial flavors can provide. Shimmering with assonances and anagrams, Stacy Doris's latest technical marvel comes stacked with Warnings to Daughters, battle scenes, a Pull-Out Bonus for girls, and truly excellent gore -- yielding remarkable new insights into our culture's fascination with the perpetual interplays between aggression and love. PARAMOUR works like the best of highly-engineered lipsticks: compact, sexy, and always a little scary, it encourages kissing but won't kiss off. I'm completely besotted! -- Sianne Ngai.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Mythic in the spirit of the Satyricon, medieval in its gothic complexity and perversely reasonable in the late-enlightenment manner of Sade, Doris's manual on the art and intoxications of love takes readers on an excessive, libidinous, polymorphic romp through the varied permutations of our chosen objectsAand in the meantime finds that off-stage, rarely seen space where aesthetics and titillation meet in lascivious embrace. As Doris writes in her introduction, the book, primarily through phrasal anagram and palindrome, works toward a "demonstration and distortion of many kinds of lyric verse" as it collides with "human sexual response." Her mirrored landscape is strewn with figures from the folk tradition who come to life in terrifying, inverted William Blake-like constructions: "Pipe drives the kids wild, Piping sprinkles bright goo, In a cloud of chewy fluid, And Pipe laughing sing to all: 'Pipe a game about a toy!' So kids pop with happy guns. 'Pipey peek in fun again'; So shoot too to tickle here." Such disturbing poems seem to ask if form can ever be taken as a poem's sole content, or if poems must inevitably take on a moral, ideological stance or philosophical pose to justify themselves. Like Lee Ann Brown's Polyverse (Sun & Moon), Paramour skids through a variety of formal poses, transmitting its carnal logic through pun and prose, epigraph and song. "A Four-Tongued Version" from the chapter "How to Love" is a beautiful, long sequence of shorter quatrain poems like versified fortune-cookies, each one either a sharp, beguiling puzzle, some kernel of "wisdom", or a telescoped narrative: "While she slept he suffered her sister. Whose weather could be nicer?" Included is a calendar of valentinesAone poem for every day of February, a manual of love and war based on the writings of Sun Tzu, several pages that seem like games, and other (sometimes creepy) delights. Doris's book is free of the sentimentality and psychological anguish most of us identify with love, but it is recognizablyAscarily and wonderfullyAhuman. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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