PLEASURE
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
PLEASURE is a book-length poem which muses on the phenomenology of solitude in a pastoral landscape, written in a diaristic, lyric mode, where the queer “I” alternately savors the decadence of isolation and stands at the precipice of despair. A travelogue in verse, PLEASURE takes place in Syros, the Greek island to which author Angelo Nikolopolous travels a few weeks after the discovery of his mother’s brain tumor. These intertextual, elliptical explorations of solitude and sensuality interweave images of seaside roaming, secluded town life, and ephemeral sexual encounters with the ubiquitous implication of death—the waning summer, the ill, perhaps dying, mother. Staring down true disconnection—both physical and psychic orphanhood —Nikolopoulos writes about the thrill and sadness of turning your back against the world and those in it only to rediscover that which tethers all to human experience: the quotidian, singular pleasures of having a body.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nikolopoulos follows Obscenely Yours with a lyric travelogue of a queer writer visiting the Greek island of Syros after his mother's diagnosis with a brain tumor. As he explores the "jagged, prehistoric" coastal landscape, fear and grief over his mother's prognosis lurk at the edges of his mind. But this is foremost a book of the flesh, of a "bachelor," "unmonitored" and "untethered" in a foreign land, "having chosen aloneness,/ removed self from need's loud reel." Pleasure, Nikolopoulos observes, is a "reflexive desire ... when faced with self-annihilation." He evokes experiences of the body in luscious, often vivid detail, from the solitary to the sexual, and sometimes both: "Perhaps I absorb men/ like a greedy mouth? I harvest and preserve/ them in my mind like an owl pellet." But no pleasure can numb the pain of losing a parent. He cannot "retreat from the world/ into the amphitheater of the mind." He cannot save his mother from death. "Pleasure exists," Nikolopoulos writes, striking the central epiphany of the book, "in the echo that follows or the ache that precedes it." This ruminative book will reawaken readers' senses.
