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Enid Shomer’s edited collection All We Know of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica by Women is now available from Blair Publishing! “A groundbreaking anthology of well-known female poets that broadens traditional notions of erotic poetry." Poets in the anthology include Sharon Olds, Kim Addonizio, Elizabeth Alexander, Ada Limón, Robin Becker, Lucille Clifton, among many others. |
“I absolutely loved these poems and devoured them in one night— like a lover who wants to take her time but can’t. They reminded me of what I first learned stealing Erica Jong off my mom’s shelf when I was a teenager: sex is the force that drives the world, and women writing about it, with all that energy, particularity, sensuality, and humor, is the powerful force that cracks the world open.”
―Jenna Blum, New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us and The Lost Family
"All We Know of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica by Women is a breathtaking, eros driven, somatic poetic love letter to women's bodies. So many of the poets who changed my life and writing live inside this book, and isn't that the truth of it, that poets give our desires and ecstasies back to us? I read it with my whole body, dripping with delight."
―Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Misfits Manifesto
―Jenna Blum, New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us and The Lost Family
"All We Know of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica by Women is a breathtaking, eros driven, somatic poetic love letter to women's bodies. So many of the poets who changed my life and writing live inside this book, and isn't that the truth of it, that poets give our desires and ecstasies back to us? I read it with my whole body, dripping with delight."
―Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Misfits Manifesto
Excerpt from the Anthology
The Knowing
by Sharon Olds
Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise-
comaed, and woken, we lie a long time
looking at each other.
I do not know what he sees, but I see
eyes of quiet evenness
and endurance, a patience like the dignity
of matter. I love the open ocean
blue-grey-green of his iris, I love
the curve of it against the white,
that curve the sight of what has caused me
to go over, when he’s quite still, deep
inside me. I have never seen a curve
like that, except our sphere, from outer
space. I don’t know where he got
his kindness without self-regard,
almost without self, and yet
he chose one woman, instead of the others.
By knowing him, I get to know
the purity of the animal
which mates for life. Sometimes he is slightly
smiling, but mostly he just gazes at me gazing,
his entire face lit. I love
to see it change if I cry––there is no worry,
no pity, a graver radiance. If we
are on our backs, side by side,
with our faces turned fully to face each other,
I can hear a tear from my lower eye
hit the sheet, as if it is an early day on earth,
and then the upper eye’s tears
braid and sluice down through the lower eyebrow
like the invention of farming, irrigation, a non-nomadic people.
I am so lucky that I can know him.
This is the only way to know him.
I am the only one who knows him.
When I wake again, he is still looking at me,
as if he is eternal. For an hour
we wake and doze, and slowly I know
that though we are sated, though we are hardly
touching, this is the coming that the other
brought us to the edge of––we are entering,
deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze,
this place beyond the other places,
beyond the body itself, we are making
love.
The Knowing
by Sharon Olds
Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise-
comaed, and woken, we lie a long time
looking at each other.
I do not know what he sees, but I see
eyes of quiet evenness
and endurance, a patience like the dignity
of matter. I love the open ocean
blue-grey-green of his iris, I love
the curve of it against the white,
that curve the sight of what has caused me
to go over, when he’s quite still, deep
inside me. I have never seen a curve
like that, except our sphere, from outer
space. I don’t know where he got
his kindness without self-regard,
almost without self, and yet
he chose one woman, instead of the others.
By knowing him, I get to know
the purity of the animal
which mates for life. Sometimes he is slightly
smiling, but mostly he just gazes at me gazing,
his entire face lit. I love
to see it change if I cry––there is no worry,
no pity, a graver radiance. If we
are on our backs, side by side,
with our faces turned fully to face each other,
I can hear a tear from my lower eye
hit the sheet, as if it is an early day on earth,
and then the upper eye’s tears
braid and sluice down through the lower eyebrow
like the invention of farming, irrigation, a non-nomadic people.
I am so lucky that I can know him.
This is the only way to know him.
I am the only one who knows him.
When I wake again, he is still looking at me,
as if he is eternal. For an hour
we wake and doze, and slowly I know
that though we are sated, though we are hardly
touching, this is the coming that the other
brought us to the edge of––we are entering,
deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze,
this place beyond the other places,
beyond the body itself, we are making
love.