Eve's Striptease

By Julia Kasdorf and Cleo Qian

As its title proclaims, Eve's Striptease delivers a female voice that seeks to "find out for (her)self/ all the desires a body can hold." Through artful acts of revelation and concealment, these poems test experience against the notions of love and loss that tradition and religion have taught us. These narrative and lyric poems celebrate desire, marriage, and domestic life; they visit sexual terror and consider sickness and death. Construing all of life as a journey that takes us from innocence to knowledge, this work suggests that the maps that we need for this journey may be found written on our own bodies. Kasdorf writes of a life's migrations, tracing paths that joyfully enlarge our definitions of love and longing - sometimes embracing conventional values and sometimes subverting them.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822956683
• ISBN13: 9780822956686
• Release Date: February 1998
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.9" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Moving

This is a wonderful book of poetry that inspires much reflection. Each poem somehow transforms itself into a fragment of my own life's story. The body becomes a main element of Kasdorf's work; religion is also a strong theme, addressing the bubble that tradition can form around believers.

beautiful and disturbing

This collection of poems explores, almost painfully, issues of sexuality and religion. Kasdorf has captured the experience of woman who have grown up, and asserted their person-hood in a world where they are viewed as sexual objects; and where the church has rarely been a help, and often a hinderance. Not for the faint -hearted or those looking for 'inspriational poetry' this collection of poems speakes deeply to me as a woman, and as someone who is strongly religious.