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.

Jong's poetry is visceral and base and beautiful.

for EVERY woman- especially if you like a blood red hardback that fits in your purse.

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.

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.

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.

Funny, moving, delightful, life-changing.

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.

So I loved the first section, and then the rest was meh.

I have mixed feelings about this collection of poems by Erica Jong. I have somehow collected a number of her books on my shelves over the years but this is the first of her writings that I've ever read through so far. The title of the collection is a nod to a Walt Whitman poem but Jong's poems here vary in themes. Some serve as shout-outs to her favorite writers -- Neruda (she describes Neruda as "a poet of lemons, a poet of lemony light"), Whitman, Keats, Collette, Sylvia Plath.

She writes of nature -- one poem even being an elegy to a beluga whale she read about that died while in captivity at Coney Island in 1974.

She also examines relationships (as poets often do) -- mother-daughter / familial / romantic. The romantic themes do sometimes verge on the highly sexual. She also gets into just the general experience of being a woman. If you're squeamish, I warn you now -- there are multiple references to the menstrual cycle, noticeable enough that even I got to where even I as a woman was like OKAAAY now, next topic LOL

Some of the poems had really lovely lines in them while others I just found more on the meh side. Either way, there was something to Jong's writing that I did like so, having now sampled some of her poetry, I am curious to see how some of her novels compare.

A few of my favorite snippets from this collection:

"Exhiles" : "Birth is the start of loneliness, and loneliness is the start of poetry: that seems a crude reduction of it all, but truth is often crude."

"Letter To Myselves": "You can be hurt because you care too much, because your ribs swing out like shutters & your heart glows like a night light."

"You Whom I Hoped To Reach By Writing": "My strange vocation is to be paid for my nightmares."

"Chant For An Ambivalent Lady At Implantation" (the clunky titles poets come up with sometimes!): "All his hands on your body cascading, all his hands of water making water music on your marble breasts"

"Spring X 2": "I lay down with you in imagination and ran away from you in life / The whole park was pink & green & we rode in a yellow taxi drenched with rain & my glasses were fogged with spring rain & wanting you till I ran away."

Loveroot is not so great. Again, if had more control over the rating system, I'd go with something more like 2.6. This book works about half of the time.