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erica jong

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The poet-novelist's third collection, consists of verse messages of love, fear, anxiety, and longing to fellow writers living and dead, to the outside world, and to herself

114 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1,1975

This edition

Format
114 pages, Hardcover
Published
January 1, 1975 by Holt Rinehart \u0026 Winston
ISBN
9780030140464
ASIN
0030140463
Language
English

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About the author

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erica jong

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Erica Jong—novelist, poet, and essayist—has consistently used her craft to help provide women with a powerful and rational voice in forging a feminist consciousness. She has published 21 books, including eight novels, six volumes of poetry, six books of non-fiction and numerous articles in magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times, the Sunday Times of London, Elle, Vogue, and the New York Times Book Review.

In her groundbreaking first novel, Fear of Flying (which has sold twenty-six million copies in more than forty languages), she introduced Isadora Wing, who also plays a central part in three subsequent novels—How to Save Your Own Life, Parachutes and Kisses, and Any Woman's Blues. In her three historical novels—Fanny, Shylock's Daughter, and Sappho's Leap—she demonstrates her mastery of eighteenth-century British literature, the verses of Shakespeare, and ancient Greek lyric, respectively. A memoir of her life as a writer, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, came out in March 2006. It was a national bestseller in the US and many other countries. Erica's latest book, Sugar in My Bowl, is an anthology of women writing about sex, has been recently released in paperback.

Erica Jong was honored with the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature. She has also received Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize, also won by W.S. Merwin and Sylvia Plath. In France, she received the Deauville Award for Literary Excellence and in Italy, she received the Sigmund Freud Award for Literature. The City University of New York awarded Ms. Jong an honorary PhD at the College of Staten Island.

Her works have appeared all over the world and are as popular in Eastern Europe, Japan, China, and other Asian countries as they have been in the United States and Western Europe. She has lectured, taught and read her work all over the world.

A graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University's Graduate Faculties where she received her M.A. in 18th Century English Literature, Erica Jong also attended Columbia's graduate writing program where she studied poetry with Stanley Kunitz and Mark Strand. In 2007, continuing her long-standing relationship with the university, a large collection of Erica's archival material was acquired by Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where it will be available to graduate and undergraduate students. Ms. Jong plans to teach master classes at Columbia and also advise the Rare Book Library on the acquisition of other women writers' archives.

Calling herself “a defrocked academic,” Ms. Jong has partly returned to her roots as a scholar. She has taught at Ben Gurion University in Israel, Bennington College in the US, Breadloaf Writers' Conference in Vermont and many other distinguished writing programs and universities. She loves to teach and lecture, though her skill in these areas has sometimes crowded her writing projects. “As long as I am communicating the gift of literature, I'm happy,” Jong says. A poet at heart, Ms. Jong believes that words can save the world.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4 / 5.0, 11 votes)
5 stars
4(36%)
4 stars
3(27%)
3 stars
4(36%)
2 stars
0(0%)
1 stars
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11 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
ThaBaghDadi
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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There's something about Erica Jong's writing that makes me pause. An elusive quality lingers through her poetry. It pulls me in while simultaneously keeps me at arms length, never fully coming into contact with the subjects of her poetry. We circle it with delicious curiosity and then it's over. I fell in love with her poetry when I was a freshman in college after reading Fear of Flying, then out of love as a senior, and now I am just curious. Beautiful and curious.
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Thevikingtaco
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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for EVERY woman- especially if you like a blood red hardback that fits in your purse.
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ddaruu
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I thought that Erica Jong had a wonderful command of sound in this book. Every poem was elegant, flowing, and beautifully crafted. Why the two star rating then? Because I had serious issues with some of the content. I thought she used the "f-bomb" and the "c-word" with far too high a frequency. I don't need to see either one even once in a book, much less both, over and over. I was also very uncomfortable with the entire middle section, "In the Penile Colony", which contained overtly sexual poems of all sorts. I generally dislike sexual imagery unless I can detect a purpose, which I did not feel. I found these poems neither arousing nor deeply meaningful. The third section, "Hungering" was the best, and I thought "Tapestry, with Unicorn" was the best poem in the whole book. I would recommend this book for anyone who enjoys (or at least doesn't mind) poetry with lots of sexually explicit imagery, as the poems were very well written with a good sense of flow and sound.
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Sloth_Hawk
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Erica Jong's brilliant book of poems was a life-raft for me during a very dark time. Her words are so beautiful, I wanted to BE them. I wanted to live inside the pages of this book and soak it in. Beautiful. Strong. Empowering. Understanding. This is a book that has my heart.
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pip25
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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You know what it’s okay. I think I liked about half of the poems really (my favorites being the first part of Testament, Statue and The Stone People). I think lots of her lines and verses were striking and powerful but other then finding them cool I didn’t really connect with her work. It could be that it simply doesn’t reach me in 2023 when she wrote this in 1975. Lots of talk of bleeding and pleasure and mothers and daughters and nipples and penises and motherhood and lots of shout outs to her favorite writers and favorite women writers. I usually don’t read a lot of poetry but I enjoyed flipping through this collection. I also haven’t read a lot of feminist work from the time either so I can’t really see how it fits in but I admire her for writing boldly; otherwise I’d have never read the line “No doom-saying, death-dealing, fucker of cunts can undo me now”, now that’s a testament.
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benincasa
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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What I look for in poetry is something that is accessible and speaks to me personally. This collection is accessible but didn't touch me personally.
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