Six Lips [Perfect Paperback]

Penelope Scambly Schott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2010 | ISBN-10: 093241284X | ISBN-13: 978-0932412843

Six Lips is an imagistic and offbeat approach to the old standards of love, death, and the planet where they happen. The titular six lips include those of the vulva. Nimble and tender, sensuous and biting, deliciously daring, and always grounded in felt experience, Penelope Scambly Schott s poems take us on wild and glorious flights of womanhood. The speaker of these poems is nothing if not multiple and shape-shifting. The poems are feisty, thoughtful, fun to read. They riot with original and often dreamlike images: monkeys "who have learned to speak in words," a "broom of violets," and even a child as a horse.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Insightful, sure footed, possessed of an unerring ear for the music of language, Schott summons deft images from the natural world as she confronts the great themes of literature: death, love and the human experience, its duplicity and grace; this is the work of a poet writing in full stride. Praise be. --Colette Inez

Insightful, sure footed, possessed of an unerring ear for the music of language, Schott summons deft images from the natural world as she confronts the great themes of literature: death, love and the human experience, its duplicity and grace; this is the work of a poet writing in full stride. Praise be. --Colette Inez

Penelope Scambly Schott s poems take us on wild and glorious flights of womanhood to "countries inside [her] head," where the re-imagined self is a playful menagerie of "improvisations," where "moral accounting" is a fanciful cycle of songs. With poems of loss and remembrance, of acceptance and reconciliation, of transformations and mutations, Six Lips is one of the strongest, most inventive books I ve read in years. --Ingrid Wendt

The speaker of these poems is...a woman of "six lips," "nine knees," "ten thumbs," concerned with issues of love, sexuality, how to deal with a mother disappearing into dementia. These are poems willing to face emotions that are not always simple or "nice," willing to question what it means to be a woman in these times.... Ultimately they are brave. When the d.j. in "Moral Accounting" calls to ask: The world is about to end; do you have any comment? this poet answers, I will have to sing: Gloria, gloria, gloria.... The one song. --Pat Fargnoli

The speaker of these poems is...a woman of "six lips," "nine knees," "ten thumbs," concerned with issues of love, sexuality, how to deal with a mother disappearing into dementia. These are poems willing to face emotions that are not always simple or "nice," willing to question what it means to be a woman in these times.... Ultimately they are brave. When the d.j. in "Moral Accounting" calls to ask: The world is about to end; do you have any comment? this poet answers, I will have to sing: Gloria, gloria, gloria.... The one song. --Pat Fargnoli

Insightful, sure footed, possessed of an unerring ear for the music of language, Schott summons deft images from the natural world as she confronts the great themes of literature: death, love and the human experience, its duplicity and grace; this is the work of a poet writing in full stride. Praise be. --Colette Inez

The speaker of these poems is...a woman of "six lips," "nine knees," "ten thumbs," concerned with issues of love, sexuality, how to deal with a mother disappearing into dementia. These are poems willing to face emotions that are not always simple or "nice," willing to question what it means to be a woman in these times.... Ultimately they are brave. When the d.j. in "Moral Accounting" calls to ask: The world is about to end; do you have any comment? this poet answers, I will have to sing: Gloria, gloria, gloria.... The one song. --Pat Fargnoli

About the Author

Penelope Scambly Schott is the author of a novel, six previous poetry books, and five chapbooks. Her poetry books include three historical verse narratives, Penelope: The Story of the Half-Scalped Woman, The Pest Maiden: A Story of Lobotomy, and A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth (Oregon Book Award for Poetry, 2008), as well as three lyric collections, The Perfect Mother (Violet Reed Hass Prize, 1994), Baiting the Void (Orphic Prize, 2005), and May the Generations Die in the Right Order. She has received four fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and residencies at The Fine Arts Work Center, The Vermont Studio Center, and the Wurlitzer Foundation. Penelope lives in Portland, Oregon where she hikes, grades papers, paints, and spoils her family, especially her dog, Lily Schott Sweetdog.

Product Details

• Perfect Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Mayapple Press (January 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 093241284X
• ISBN-13: 978-0932412843
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,259,811 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Poems of Wholeness, October 14, 2011

By 

Elizabeth Oakes (Bowling Green, KY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Six Lips (Paperback)

Throughout much of history, women were to be, as they put it in the sixteenth century, "chaste, silent, and obedient." Women were controlled in two ways: their mouths and their vaginas. The poems in the aptly and provocatively titled Six Lips celebrate the overturning of these strictures. This is a book of poems by a poet rooted in life, one that is both spiritual and sensual, one that arises from where the two are opposites and where the two are one.

In 1968 Muriel Rukeyser wrote "The Poem as Mask," in which she declared that for her, as a woman poet, there would be "no more masks, no more mythologies"; she would speak as herself, and "for the first time, . . . the fragments join," she wrote, "in me with their own music." These are poems Rukeyser would admire; these are poems about a woman's experience of the world through her body. As such, when one opens, lives from, and venerates the body, one morphs into spirituality. This is a book about seeing the world of being in this world of form; in "Behind the Waterfall I Become Invisible Again": Schott writes that it is "as if I have seen Being / become Is."

Sometimes the poems are reminiscent of Plath, especially "Sacrament of the Moths," but she, fortunate to have been born in a later generation, swims the dark waters of Plath as if it were the English Channel and arrives triumphant on the other side.

Some lines resonate for me: "In my time," said the old lady, / the moon was redder, and men more beautiful" and "Or maybe it happens only in your final illness / as you convalesce from being alive."

This is a true poet, one speaking from wholeness.