Customer Reviews

Sex Lives of the Poor and Obscure (Poetry Series)

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he ain't; despite what my mother says. I detect a few precious "artiste" moments where he sneers at us (and himself). But mainly, I am awestruck by Mr. Schloss' authenticity in discussing matters of the soul. The id is his stage and his gold-medal skating rink. He has got it going on. Mr. Schloss, are you writing songs for Alanis Morissette?

This funny, offbeat, unforgettable book by one of America's best, neglected poets of the twentieth century is a "must read" for anyone seriously interested in American literature at the start of a new millennium. Schloss's cinematically graphic re-creations of everything from his parents' honeymoon to woven figures in carpets prove that, to alter the title of one of Schloss's best poems, words are worth a thousand pictures.

Wow! I had never heard of Schloss. Lured by his title, Sex Lives of the Poor and Obscure, I was riveted. I actually ended up buying two copies of the book, one for me, one for my mother! If Schloss's characters aren't caught in Oprah's glitzy limelight, they live lives of quiet desperation in the kind of 100-watt illumination which I think my mother and I fully understand. Also, what I find captivating about Schloss are the cleverness and humor which underlie his poems. He has the guts, the panache to write his own elegy in "At the Grave of D.S." and, in a perfectly dead-pan, posthumous way, begin his 18-liner with a reference to the actual grave: "He knew nothing about it / until a friend mentioned it / who said he cried over it / on his way to the dentist"! This poet laughs up his sleeve so contagiously that I found myself laffing out loud with him. Whoever he is--and I guess he lives in Cincinnati--I want to say thank you to him for a book I found neither poor nor obscure, but, rather, rich in its wit, great in its hard-earned wisdom.