Making Love to Roget's Wife: Poems New and Selected

By Ron Koertge

Book Overview

In Plain, Unpretentious Language, with brutal honesty, Ron Koertge can meld violence, love, human ugliness, joy, and modern depravity into a short lyric that makes us laugh out loud or socks us in the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 155728461X
• ISBN13: 9781557284617
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Length: 126 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Making Love to Roget's Wife

The book was in excellent condition and I was very satisfied with delivery time as well.

"The stutter of a nudist"

Does the mere presence of nudists leave an afterimage, an after-sensation, in the air, the water, the grass, the wood they have touched? Apparently the "fundamentalists" in Koertge's poem "Fundamentalists Group Rejects Nudist Campsite" believe so. Do the "unheralded organs" really all long to be "the Penis, who is treated so gently"? Is it possible that the man in the moon "is not poised up there, / but hanging from a dark noose"? In the world of Koertge's fine comic poetry, the answer is yes. Or perhaps, as in his poem on the "old days" when names described what you were, you'd like to stand alone with Mr. Koertge [Mr. "Cur Cheese"?] as the young maidens walk past with "Mr. Cook, Mr. / Archer, Mr. Golden Pants." In Koertge's world, all those monkeys at typewriters are exploring "the great subjects of Monkey / Literature," which are not the banana and the tire, but humiliation and grief; according to his "dirty postcards", no one is "having a wonderful time." "Making Love to Roget's Wife" is a rare commodity in American poetry: a collection of comic verse which is not a collection of foolish limericks or asinine rhymes, but rather a sensitive and pointed look into the comedy of life and imagination, and suggestive of the more tragic aspects of those worlds as well. And only here can you learn how many dresses Roget's wife stepped out OF when she was stepping out ON Roget