Erotikon: Poems

By Susan Mitchell

Book Overview

How do we discover our deepest desires, those that at once elude and define us? And is it in the discovery--indeed, the realization--of such desires that we finally encounter our essential selves?

Erotikon, Susan Mitchell's astounding new collection, invites us to examine, in shattering detail, the anatomy of pleasure. Sexual appetite--voracious and violent, delicate and lingering--is the pathway to discovery, not just of the self, but of the vast world to which we are connected. Mitchell wants to be shattered, smashed, broken by passion, not for the sake of annihilation, but rather its opposite: Only in so breaking do we allow for the possibility of true communion--with other people, with sensual experience, with the world's redeeming spirit. In Erotikon Mitchell imagines an existence devoid of barriers: "Sometimes I think this, our life on earth, is an egg to break out of. I am claustrophobic. " It is when we are least recognizably ourselves--moved beyond such familiars as gender, names, our human bodies--that we are most alive: primal and burgeoning, poised for an engagement so complete it has the power to transform.

In this collection Mitchell is at her most assured and dazzling: Her lyrics balance the intimate candor for which her work is known with both erudite authority and mischief. Drawing the reader like a lover as though through the natural rhythms of lovemaking--from seduction to surrender to symbiosis--Erotikon is a paean to the communion we long for, and sometimes experience, in our lives on earth.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060553537
• ISBN13: 9780060553531
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A Wonderful Collection!

You will be drawn into Mitchell's musical and mysterious creation that is as dangerously tempting as it is playful. Each poem feels like a "bird calling, always up ahead, yearning me deeper in." The same voice that sings "Bye Baby Bunting" and "Wimble and wight" and speaks of whipping the self to "glees of teeter" also speaks of the desire that is "clawing/ the body, finding the weakest spot to break out of."Mitchell explores human desire and the hungers of this animal existence. "Think flicker and fluid and flow" and you will be caught up in the lyrical transformation that the language lures us into. The poems pull and tug and tempt and stir. Their worlds are worlds worth entering. "What is so strange / it feels like home? It calls. I follow."