Readers of Linda Smukler's previous work--she is widely published in poetry journals and has an earlier book--will immediately recognize her trademark form: neatly justified prose-poem paragraphs. The look of these paragraphs and the photographs that face them on opposite pages are as visually arresting as the words. Smukler explores the appearance of desire and how the love/sex object is seen in the context of what has come before, the history and fantasies that shape our present. Taking off on Napoleon's plea to Josephine, "Home In Three Days. Don't Wash," the speaker in Smukler's poems places herself in a lineage of lovers who, while seeming powerful in the world, are easily made desperate by desire. Home in Three Days is a Lambda Literary Award finalist for Lesbian Poetry.
From Scientific American
The subject is sex--of these written things. I won't call them poems or prose, to tell you the truth I think it's secret speech gone public. Linda Smukler talks us through the rooms of sex, along telephone wires, to hotel rooms and rustic streets. And a terrifying absence looms alongside all its cagey fullness--the missed message, the desperation, the erratic fumblings towards orgasm or whatever. It's lesbian sex, lesbian speech, the bubbling details of a life lived and spoken, who has a job, is married, owns a dog, drinks juice and tea, drives a car and is utterly totally obsessed with sex. It's disturbingly true. If sex has a flag, this is it.
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