Pleasure Principle
Poems
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
An astonishing debut collection of poems about desire and the chaos of youth.
In her stunning debut collection, Madeleine Cravens explores desire in all its transgressive power and wildness. Pleasure and pain are inextricable in these carefully observed poems, capturing a young woman on the threshold of adulthood as she seeks to understand herself. With a hard-edged vulnerability and singularly bold style, Cravens is unsparing about the struggle to make sense of one’s longings.
Taking us from the parks and plazas of Brooklyn to the freeways of California, these poems allow us to watch a life unfold where “womanhood felt like an incorrect container,” and love is performed “in the historic way, with bartering and harsh alliances.” As Cravens casts her questioning eye across the possibilities of queer relationships and the curious shapes of family bonds—both the ones we’re born into and the ones we choose—she urges readers to consider how we become ourselves.
Moving, captivating, and funny, Pleasure Principle heralds the arrival of a fearless and vibrant new voice in American poetry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cravens opens her searching debut with a litany of loose anapests and delicious slant rhymes on the theme of pleasure: "Not the pleasure of lovers but the pleasure of letters,/ a pleasure like weather, delayed and prepared for,/ not the pleasure of lessons but the pleasure of errors." The book's questionable delights—terrors, daughters, unanswered letters—are revisited in the sparser poems that follow, which offer cryptic vignettes of sexual explorations and familial dysfunction that move through Brooklyn, rural landscapes, and Lebanon (briefly) before arriving in California: "after the party, Ellen choked me against the refrigerator./ It was very quiet. Other students filtered into the snow./ Can there be a story where a character wants nothing?/ Even in happiness I did not find much satisfaction." Another poem recalls, "Last night I let a stranger hit me in the face./ She was a therapist. After, we discussed real estate." "Jacob Riis Beach" develops into an elegantly stark recollection of a building and a relationship: "Damp brick walls, cracked windows./ Then I remember its absence. In the end,/ there is only exposure: the wind-blown recess/ where a building stood." Though occasionally uneven, particularly in its more fragmentary poems, this collection successfully delivers the eros and disorder of young adult life.
