Home in Three Days, Don't Wash (Lingo Books): Smukler, Linda: 9780963843388: Amazon.com: Books

fiction & photography, "the subject is sex..."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Readers of Linda Smukler's previous work--she is widely published in poetry journals and has an earlier book--will immediately recognize her trademark form: neatly justified prose-poem paragraphs. The look of these paragraphs and the photographs that face them on opposite pages are as visually arresting as the words. Smukler explores the appearance of desire and how the love/sex object is seen in the context of what has come before, the history and fantasies that shape our present. Taking off on Napoleon's plea to Josephine, "Home In Three Days. Don't Wash," the speaker in Smukler's poems places herself in a lineage of lovers who, while seeming powerful in the world, are easily made desperate by desire. Home in Three Days is a Lambda Literary Award finalist for Lesbian Poetry.

From Scientific American

The subject is sex--of these written things. I won't call them poems or prose, to tell you the truth I think it's secret speech gone public. Linda Smukler talks us through the rooms of sex, along telephone wires, to hotel rooms and rustic streets. And a terrifying absence looms alongside all its cagey fullness--the missed message, the desperation, the erratic fumblings towards orgasm or whatever. It's lesbian sex, lesbian speech, the bubbling details of a life lived and spoken, who has a job, is married, owns a dog, drinks juice and tea, drives a car and is utterly totally obsessed with sex. It's disturbingly true. If sex has a flag, this is it.

From The New Yorker

1966: on my tiny teen phonograph I played the yellow Atco single, When a Man Loves a Woman till its grooves went faint, moved beyond words by it message of strength and passion through weakness and chains. Now Linda Smukler has re-invented butch desire as a passionate amalgam of abjection, power and trembling knees. She knows the doubt and fear behind every stern visage the restless tugs of absence that surge beneath identity. Smukler is the Percy Sledge of lesbian butch-femme. Cri-de-coeur écriture.

Review

There's a photograph in here that's hard to read at first. Then suddenly you see it's two, imposed on one another: portraits of Linda Smukler and Gertrude Stein. Stein hovers behind, above, beneath these brazen texts. Like her modernist forebear, Smukler uses the most direct and plain American idiom to render the complexity and anguish, and the humor of desire. -- Rebecca Brown, author of Gifts of the Body

About the Author

Linda Smukler is the author of two books of poetry: Normal Sex (Firebrand Books, 1994) and Home In Three Days. Don't Wash, a multi-media project with accompanying CD-ROM (Hard Press, 1996, http://www. hardpress.com). She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and studied the visual arts at the Yale School of Art and at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and has received fellowships in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Astraea Foundation. She also won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction from Nimrod magazine (1988). Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Pucker Up, Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, The New Fuck You/adventures in lesbian reading, Women On Women III, The Zenith of Desire, My Lover Is A Woman/ Contemporary Love Poems, The Arc of Love, Close Calls/New Lesbian Fiction and Best American Erotica/1996. She is co-editor with Susan Fox Rogers, of the forthcoming Portraits of Love (St. Martin's Press, 1997).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

DAYS INN
It was astonishing to walk into room 233 at the Days Inn the door open for us / to turn on the lights and to close the curtains / to see you first locked into that tan recliner as I sat on the (slightly darker) tan carpet / my back up against the coarse blue bedspread / to smell disinfectant and to drink bitter tea / to feel the minutes of our short afternoon slip away into nervousness and the prints on the off-white walls / then how you lay down on the bed / and I lay next to you / to kiss / no / to talk / to get comfortable with each other again / we heard raised voices from somewhere / from the side or overhead / we couldn't figure out where / perhaps a meeting or ten TVs / screaming children or a gathering of boys to watch the football game / these were all possibilities as gradually the voices got so loud I called the front desk to complain / the desk clerk said the voices were coming from below / something religious for sure / evangelists or a revival meeting / I told the clerk that I would call her back if we needed to move / then you asked me to turn off the hard lights and I did and lay back down next to you and then on top of you and I finally forgave myself for letting you wait at the train station / I remember you turned me over and how delirious I became at your touch / and at a certain point I was overwhelmed with the desire to enter you and all the while beneath us they called on the Lord / they called for salvation / the desk called and out of breath I answered and said we were fine and did not want to move and it was true / the room had become as if lighted by candles and we lay on a sacred bier accompanied by hosannas and hallelujahs / and the chalice of your scent / the icon of your face / the idols of your breasts in black lace / the staff of your finger in my ass and my cock in your cunt / our coming joined from below by shouts and applause and the exalted blessings of the possessed

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hard Press Editions
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 25, 1996
Edition ‏ : ‎ First Edition
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 93 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0963843389
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0963843388
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.05 x 0.28 x 9.09 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #9,730,371 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #166,337 in Poetry (Books)
- #658,201 in Arts & Photography (Books)

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Home in Three Days, Don't Wash (Lingo Books) Paperback – January 25, 1996