In The Sensual World Re-emerges, Eleanor Lerman’s fifth collection of poetry, she circles back to the themes that began her career at age twenty-one with publication of the book, Armed Love, which The New York Times Book Review said was “bound to unnerve us” with its “hunger [and] savage humor.” The more recent collections muse in a kinder fashion on the themes of love, loss, and aging. But in The Sensual World, Lerman reminds her readers that she’s still prowling the darkness where the soul can be a treacherous and needy companion, where the hunger to penetrate the mystery of consciousness and what lies beyond is never sated, and where the poet, still armed and dangerous, never rests. This is a spectacular collection from an award-winning poet writing at the absolute height of her powers.

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Gone Are the Days of the Great Blondes

What you think is that you might
be sick. I think that I might be, too
with something that is a big disease:
estrangement, nostalgia, a condition
that waxes and wanes while you
consider what it all means. While you
wash your hair. While you make
the bed and make it again and again

Well, we have to face it: gone
are the days of the great blondes
in winter kitchens making soup,
of living in the country, of casting
spells. Of pulling roots and flowers
from the ground in the belief that only
loving hands can make the harvest

in which the world will finally change
It will not change. It is not the natural way
"The world" does not get better or worse,
it simply slides away. Blinks, forgets,
ignores all our hard work (think of the hours
in the library, studying magic) and then

enters a new phase. It feels
no responsibility to warn us that
all we can do is unburden ourselves
of the superfluous, lay down in the
fabric of everyday life and wait

For what? Picture the
unimaginable: being stalked
by a ghost with a death ray,
being saved by a Vulcan kiss

Picture tomorrow. Step out
of it. Now you are cured

Blurbs

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"Eleanor Lerman's poems have sociological savvy, philosophical rue, historical recognition, and vernacular resilience. They sing a song that is bravely gloomy, but they sing it with a fierce and earned dignity."

–Tony Hoagland, The Nation

"Every bit as imaginative, funny, and accessible as Billy Collins . . . but with a sharper edge, an urban knowingness, daring sexiness, and the bemused wisdom of a still-reeling survivor of the rock-'n'-roll life. Lerman is as sly as a pool hustler, mapping complex constellations on the dark felt, setting gleaming images into spinning motion, then sinking each whirling sphere into a corner pocket."

–Donna Seaman, Booklist

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