Customer Reviews

Sex Education: Poems

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Sex Education, Janice Moore Fuller's exquisitely rendered collection of poems, traverses the varied terrain of the feminine experience. Fertile with simile and metaphor, and rich with surprising leaps that land seamlessly, these lush poems--sometimes disturbing, sometimes whimsical, sometimes erotic, always honest and engaging--are a sensual and sexual celebration.

Fuller's first collection is titled Archeology Is a Destructive Science-the poet's excavation of emotional and physical sites that have moved and inspired her. It is a tantalizing promise of the work to come. Sex Education fulfills that promise; it is where the poet arrives after the science of archeology-in poems of startling image and rich metaphor. This is mature work by a poet with an accomplished formalist's deft touch as well as a mastery of the seductive, shifting landscape of free verse. This book is so strong it's impossible to put down.

After attending a reading by Janice Fuller and Keith Flynn, I just knew I needed to read one of her books and who couldn't be drawn to a poetry book titled _Sex Education_. The title is provactive, the cover art is subtle but still provacative and many of the poems run on the edge of sexual comfort. By sexual comfort I mean, the prudish nature of many people even when reading poetry.

This is a very nice collection. Fuller manages to weave poems about all many facets of the word sex. She, of course, has very titilating poems directly dealing with the act of intercourse and courtship. But, Fuller also delves into the other main definition of sex, the gender. The are poems throughout this collection where the poem struggles to discover what it means to be a woman, a mother, a wife, a lover, a should have been sister, and a sexual being.

I want to include some lines from my favorite pieces but I find the poems so full of inventive imagery and wonder that it is hard to pick a small section. But, I'll try. These lines close out _y Aunt Raises Violets from Africa_

We never touched their velvet
not even the undersides.
We just turned them each day,
their faces straining
toward the sun.

Simple and beautiful. Ah. This will be a collection to re-read. Of additional note my favorite poem just should be read in its entirety _First Cotillion_.