Now, THAT'S a book cover

Long and hard (*snicker*), I've been admiring the above image (and the work within the book it adorns). The following is an excerpt from an interview with its auther, Jill Alexander Essbaum, regarding the choice of this particular image to accompany this particular text. Read the full interview here.

Reb: The cover of your third book, Harlot, has a nekkid lady embracing a giant penis. Why a nekkid lady embracing a giant penis? Are you some kind of obsessed penis pervert? Or do you consider readers of poetry to be obsessed penis perverts?

Jill: Well, Rebecca, I could dance around that question in various and very lusty ways. I could say that the cover—a lovely watercolor by the talented Cynthia Large—aggressively and accurately represents the core theme of the book, which is a woman's (read: mine) desperation to be connected to the archetypal masculine. How she seems to be holding onto the shaft for dearest life because, in fact, the penis is the fount of dearest life, a spigot of magical elixirs. How if she loosens her hold for even a moment, she might spin out into the ether, untethered and forever lost. And the naked lady herself—as round and voluptuous as any raven-haired fertility goddess. This is all quite true. But when the pot boils down to its residue, what's left is this: Absolutely I am some kind of obsessed penis pervert. I like cock. A lot.

Bless her.

I love this bit about how a loss of sexual connection with that which is male might leave her unmoored-- and perhaps disoriented. Or that somehow hetero sex might be the thing that provides a grounding, rather than wreckage, consequence, or whatever other negative associations with sluttiness we might collectively cook up. Essbaum extrapolates a little more on this idea in the full interview, recounting a childhood dream of holding onto a fireman's pole while negotatiating competing pulls between heaven and hell. It's like she's taking some tired, thoroughly over-mined Freudian symbologies -- ones that have oft disadvantaged the female perspective in general, and the slut's perspective in specific-- and reimagining them as the very conduits of human connectivity and spirituality. And she's funny. All of the above makes me veritably sigh with satisfaction.


... and... my local, but not necessarily indie-press-enthusiast, readers might be interested to note that this book is published by No Tell Books, a little micro-press run out of Reston or Herndon or some such little No-VA town (I can't remember which) by the poet doing the interviewing above.

All of which is just to say...: Buy local! Buy indie! Buy the work of cock-lovers!

OK, that's enough with my effusive, gratutitous plugging.

However, if you are ever in bed with me and I happen to refer to your "spigot of magical elixirs," please recognize that I didn't neologize that clever phrasing all on my own. But, you know, (spontaneous, uncited) quotations are a rather sincere form of flattery, right?

(Yeah, even my pillow talk is pretentious, ironic and holds its pinky in the air.)