Erotikon

”“Erotikon” is a superb book. Its language is a kind of Joycean undersong of desire. A brash, beautiful, voluptuous innerness seems suddenly everywhere visible as if we were witnessing the soul’s dark love becoming’coming into—a body of work. It is a book of ecstatic awakenings, feverish enactments of appetite, relentless and ravishing. I know of no book like it. None that combines the pitch and fervor of erotic yearning with such exquisite boldness, none that makes so lavish and clear a case for the wisdom of excess.“– Mark Strand”We expect a lyric poet to remain sufficient to her occasions: she must strike and strike anew, and when no longer new, still resolved to be lyric, by which we mean something like a stab or a sting (as Susan Mitchell so characteristically confronted us in earlier collections, ecstatic and sorrowing and ecstatic again). The maker of lyric wrote Mitchell’s poems, let us say, but the maker of “Erotikon” writes poetry, as unexampled process, meditative and commemorative and perilous, as experience has peril at its root: rhapsody reinvented, as it must be, lyric still but historical too–how the body keeps giving it away, profligate, the ease of it–revealing even as Mitchell erases, overcoming even as she retreats. One must ‘retreat’ with her at least as far as Hopkins to account for the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! Stirred for a bird, indeed: here are the lineaments of a genial intelligence, a giant art!“– Richard Howard”Melifluous… .Mitchell’s explorations of the limits of language produce interesting results.“– “New York Times Book Review

Susan Mitchell has won many awards for her poetry including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. Her previous collection of poetry, Rapture, won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a National Book Award Finalist. Mitchell grew up in New York City and now lives in Boca Raton, where she holds the Mary Blossom Lee Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University. She is also the author of The Water Inside the Water.

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