There is a deep tradition of eroticism in American poetry. Thoughtful, provocative, moving, and sometimes mirthful, the poems collected in The Best American Erotic Poems celebrate this exuberant sensuality. These poems range across the varied landscapes of love and sex and desire -- from the intimate parts of the body to the end of an affair, from passion to solitary self-pleasure. With candor and imagination, they capture the delights and torments of sex and sexuality, nudity, love, lust, and the secret life of fantasy. David Lehman, the distinguished editor of the celebrated Best American Poetry series, has culled a witty, titillating, and alluring collection that starts with Francis Scott Key, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Hart Crane, encompasses Frank O'Hara, Anne Sexton, John Updike, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, and Sharon Olds, and concludes with the rising stars of a whole new generation of versifiers, including Sarah Manguso, Ravi Shankar, and Brenda Shaughnessy. In a section of the book that is sure to prompt discussion and further reading, the living poets write about their favorite works of erotic writing. This book will delight, surprise, and inspire.
E. E. Cummings’s erotic poems and drawings gathered in a single volume. Many years ago the prodigious and famously prolific E. E. Cummings sat in his study writing and thinking about sex. His private brooding gave way to poems and drawings of sexual and romantic love that delight and provoke. Here, collected for this first time in a single volume, are those erotic poems and sketches, culled from Cummings’s original manuscripts by the distinguished editor George James Firmage. from “16” may i feel said he (i’ll squeal said she just once said he) it’s fun said she (may i touch said he how much said she a lot said he) why not said she
This unique bilingual edition of Goethe's erotic poems contains the Roman Elegies (1789), The Diary (1810), and a selection from the Venetian Epigrams of 1790. David Luke's translations do full justice to Goethe's aim of liberating German poetry and restoring sexual love to its central position in human life. Hans Vaget's fine introduction provides the background to these poems, as well as showing some of the profound and little-known connections between them.
This new collection from the editor of Passionate Hearts: The Poetry of Sexual Love and author of The Sexual Healing Journey includes 121 poems by such poets as Rumi, Marge Piercy, Emily Dickinson, Nikki Giovanni, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Octavio Paz, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Therapist and marriage counselor Wendy Maltz turns up the heat while celebrating healthy sexuality in this collection of poems that dispel the negative cultural message that what feels good must be bad. Maltz's anthologies are designed to inspire couples toward a deeper physical intimacy and to show that the sexual impulse can be aroused by conveying personal experience through great writing.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, THE HUFFINGTON POST, AND SHELF AWARENESS • “In Hausfrau, Anna Karenina goes Fifty Shades with a side of Madame Bovary.”—Time “A debut novel about Anna, a bored housewife who, like her Tolstoyan namesake, throws herself into a psychosexual journey of self-discovery and tragedy.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Sexy and insightful, this gorgeously written novel opens a window into one woman’s desperate soul.”—People Anna was a good wife, mostly. For readers of The Girl on the Train and The Woman Upstairs comes a striking debut novel of marriage, fidelity, sex, and morality, featuring a fascinating heroine who struggles to live a life with meaning. Anna Benz, an American in her late thirties, lives with her Swiss husband, Bruno—a banker—and their three young children in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zürich. Though she leads a comfortable, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with the emotionally unavailable Bruno or even with her own thoughts and feelings, Anna tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises even her. But Anna can’t easily extract herself from these affairs. When she wants to end them, she finds it’s difficult. Tensions escalate, and her lies start to spin out of control. Having crossed a moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no going back. Intimate, intense, and written with the precision of a Swiss Army knife, Jill Alexander Essbaum’s debut novel is an unforgettable story of marriage, fidelity, sex, morality, and most especially self. Navigating the lines between lust and love, guilt and shame, excuses and reasons, Anna Benz is an electrifying heroine whose passions and choices readers will debate with recognition and fury. Her story reveals, with honesty and great beauty, how we create ourselves and how we lose ourselves and the sometimes disastrous choices we make to find ourselves. Praise for Hausfrau “Elegant . . . There is much to admire in Essbaum’s intricately constructed, meticulously composed novel, including its virtuosic intercutting of past and present.”—Chicago Tribune “For a first novelist, Essbaum is extraordinary because she is a poet. Her language is meticulous and resonant and daring.”—NPR’s Weekend Edition “We’re in literary territory as familiar as Anna’s name, but Essbaum makes it fresh with sharp prose and psychological insight.”—San Francisco Chronicle “This marvelously quiet book is psychologically complex and deeply intimate. . . . One of the smartest novels in recent memory.”—The Dallas Morning News “Essbaum’s poignant, shocking debut novel rivets.”—Us Weekly “A powerful, lyrical novel . . . Hausfrau boasts taut pacing and melodrama, but also a fully realized heroine as love-hateable as Emma Bovary.”—The Huffington Post “Imagine Tom Perrotta’s American nowheresvilles swapped out for a tidy Zürich suburb, sprinkled liberally with sharp riffs on Swiss-German grammar and European hypocrisy.”—New York
A dazzling collection of Chinese erotic poems about deep love and pure lust, enticement and seduction, ecstasy and disappointment, that span nearly three thousand years and include many poems never before translated into English. The ancient Chinese tradition of erotic poetry has been largely ignored in the west. Now, a vast continent of sensual verse is opened to us with this glorious collection spanning nearly Here are poems that express need, hunger, grief, and longing—for husbands and wives and for concubines and lovers; poems by turns explicit or subtle, light-hearted or desperate, written from both men’s and women’s points of view. The editors have drawn on a wide range of sources from 600 BCE to the present, including highly literary poems, popular verse, and folk songs, as well as poems that appeared in ancient Daoist sex manuals, in classical novels of the Ming Dynasty, and in collections of erotic prints. The result is an array of voices that speak the universal language of desire. For the first time, all the major works of this beloved writer are gathered together in one hardcover volume.
Mary Oliver is one of America's best-loved poets, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her luminous poetry celebrates nature and beauty, love and the spirit, silence and wonder, extending the visionary American tradition of Whitman, Emerson, Frost and Emily Dickinson. Her extraordinary poetry is nourished by her intimate knowledge and minute daily observation of the New England coast, its woods and ponds, its birds and animals, plants and trees.
The language of love can be beautiful or bawdy, naively simple or boldly salacious, elegantly baroque or course and common梠r, in certain moments, a wild mixture of all of these. Louis Untermeyer has gathered the world抯 greatest erotica in verse, ranging from the Bible to the present day. The most renowned poets of all time are represented in this fresh collection where freedom of range is matched by an equal freedom of speech in writing about sexual love. From Ovid to Swinburne, from Chaucer to E.E. Cummings, from Queen Elizabeth to Emily Dickinson, the poetry burns with mounting emotion and smolders with importunate pleadings, aggravating delays, passionate fulfillment or, alas, painful frustration. Here are the unexplored extremes encompassed by well-loved poets, the outspoken sensuality in the union of love and lust, and the earthy celebration of carnal pleasure. Here in more than six hundred poems, are the infinite variations in the traditional battle of the sexes: the gallant approach, the tentative flirtation, the provocative badinage, the coy denial, the gradually permitted intimacy, the timid or breathless consent, and the finally shared extremity of passion.
The poets of classical India regarded love as the first and deepest of passions. Translator and scholar Andrew Schelling perfectly encapsulates the history and passion of eighth-century India in this collection. “A single stanza of the poet Amaru,” declared a ninth-century poetry critic, “may provide the taste of love equal to what’s found in whole volumes.” Graceful and yet remarkably playful, intensely passionate, and at times hinting of divine transcendence, the poems translated here offer poignant glimpses into the many faces of erotic love. This collection, known in Sanskrit as the Amarushataka (“One Hundred Poems of Amaru”), was compiled in the eighth century and remains to this day one of India’s finest collections of love poetry. Legend connects the poetry’s authorship to King Amaru of Kashmir, while present-day scholars generally consider it an anthology of the verses of many poets.
