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Whirlwind @ Lesbos
Risa Denenberg's "Whirlwind @ Lesbos" is a collection chronicling one life echoed in many lives, real and imagined: girlhood loves, activism, friendships ravaged by AIDS, a lover lost to suicide, a son lost to a custody battle, the body getting old, the heart congesting. Women's voices speak across time and place, but are all bound by the same fierce desires, the same heartaches. "Whirlwind @ Lesbos" is a decisively erotic, explicitly lesbian collection, where the speaker being entered by a lover feels herself to be "a glove/surrounding her like a galaxy." But even the intensity of passion is tinged by melancholy, a sense of separateness. "I am no more alone than Emily Dickinson," notes the speaker, as if that fragile link to the most isolated of women poets might provide a measure of comfort. These poems are written at a distance from the speaker's passionate early self, recalling with a sense of astonishment the time "When I was still trying/to undress the universe/and know her." That time is no more. "And that has been my story," says the speaker ruefully in another poem, "not her face/but my hapless life." Yet despite a life punctuated by pain and loss, these are proud, tender and passionate poems, recounted unflinchingly, with acute lyric intensity.
@ RACHEL ROSE
"I wanted more of those nights/ your wild fingers inside me" stately yet vulnerable, these poems are vibrant reports of humans wrestling with that icky thing, baggage- sometimes lost, sometimes stolen, never forgotten. Full of passions marked by place, but not by boundaries, "Whirlwind @ Lesbos" is a necessary collection in our contemporary era of shoved-away storage units and international border politics.
@ AMY KING
Risa Denenberg's "Whirlwind @ Lesbos" is a fine coming-of-age collection especially relatable to women who evolved during the 70s and 80s and discovered woman love. Spare and sensual, the poems embody the struggle with yearning, loss, and acceptance. Confronting the complexity of physical desire and how it wanes with age, these poems leave the reader wanting to read them again and again. They are the real stuff-emotional heart and power.
@ CHELLA COURINGTON
Risa Denenberg's "Whirlwind @ Lesbos" is a book of life lived, the sense we have when older that this, here, now, is all epilogue. Denenberg recalls the thrill of young love, or was it love imagined, or love in history books, or myth? They run together, overlap, through echoes of Sappho 31, "He seems to me equal to the gods," the lover who can bear proximity to the beloved without implosion. Now, though, "when spring returns, / the forsythia fail to astonish." As sure as I know the anhedonia of which Denenberg speaks, I know these poems are a pleasure.
@ MICHAEL H. BRODER
@ RACHEL ROSE
"I wanted more of those nights/ your wild fingers inside me" stately yet vulnerable, these poems are vibrant reports of humans wrestling with that icky thing, baggage- sometimes lost, sometimes stolen, never forgotten. Full of passions marked by place, but not by boundaries, "Whirlwind @ Lesbos" is a necessary collection in our contemporary era of shoved-away storage units and international border politics.
@ AMY KING
Risa Denenberg's "Whirlwind @ Lesbos" is a fine coming-of-age collection especially relatable to women who evolved during the 70s and 80s and discovered woman love. Spare and sensual, the poems embody the struggle with yearning, loss, and acceptance. Confronting the complexity of physical desire and how it wanes with age, these poems leave the reader wanting to read them again and again. They are the real stuff-emotional heart and power.
@ CHELLA COURINGTON
Risa Denenberg's "Whirlwind @ Lesbos" is a book of life lived, the sense we have when older that this, here, now, is all epilogue. Denenberg recalls the thrill of young love, or was it love imagined, or love in history books, or myth? They run together, overlap, through echoes of Sappho 31, "He seems to me equal to the gods," the lover who can bear proximity to the beloved without implosion. Now, though, "when spring returns, / the forsythia fail to astonish." As sure as I know the anhedonia of which Denenberg speaks, I know these poems are a pleasure.
@ MICHAEL H. BRODER
- GenresPoetry
76 pages, Paperback
Published June 26, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 26, 2016
These poems are a mixture of moods, mostly sensual/sexual. Many have sad undertones, including how growing older compels us to look at our younger selves from a bigger picture perspective, including how maturing includes an ability to accept our less robust physical selves with equanimity, but not always. Note: I am not much of a poetry reader, so some of the poems went over my head; yet many of them got me in the heart and gut.
March 17, 2017
I met Risa Denenberg through the HIV Here & Now project where we both had poems published. Through this project I learned she is a Nurse Practionier who has a long history of political activism with ACT UP and working with PWAs. In fact, I've had her book, Gynecological Care Manual for HIV Positive Women, on my shelf for years. I've now had the privledge to have met her and read her book Whirlwind @ Lesbos.
Her book of poems starts out with a breathtaking poem the book is named after, it's a love story that evokes centuries. Starting in Istanbul the lover is 12 years old, the couple runs away to Naples, then Jerusalem, Copenhagen, Cairo & ends awaiting an email in New York. This powerful poem stands alone in its own section, the first of six. It is an explicit, passionate, and you realize this book will take you places you've never been.
Risa addresses major life themes centered on women's relationships with each other: sex, longing, growing older, friends and family dying. Another poem that takes up a full section (3rd) is Eating the Seed Corn, which seems to look back on her time doing AIDS Work in NY, it has years demarcated and initials inserted to mean certain people the reader does not have access to. There is a sense of mystery buried in this piece.
Section 2 has an assortment of poems that starts with an I who is fleeing to California, with a dream like quality she is traveling with, "a whole cabal of women". Then the poem, Femme Leaves Home, is a break up oem filled with anger and angst inherent when a partner leaves, the final stanza kicks us with a series of questions, "Do you think of me only/as a woman who bakes,/who fries, who burns,/who stews in her own juices?"
It is an important book and a worthwhile read.
Her book of poems starts out with a breathtaking poem the book is named after, it's a love story that evokes centuries. Starting in Istanbul the lover is 12 years old, the couple runs away to Naples, then Jerusalem, Copenhagen, Cairo & ends awaiting an email in New York. This powerful poem stands alone in its own section, the first of six. It is an explicit, passionate, and you realize this book will take you places you've never been.
Risa addresses major life themes centered on women's relationships with each other: sex, longing, growing older, friends and family dying. Another poem that takes up a full section (3rd) is Eating the Seed Corn, which seems to look back on her time doing AIDS Work in NY, it has years demarcated and initials inserted to mean certain people the reader does not have access to. There is a sense of mystery buried in this piece.
Section 2 has an assortment of poems that starts with an I who is fleeing to California, with a dream like quality she is traveling with, "a whole cabal of women". Then the poem, Femme Leaves Home, is a break up oem filled with anger and angst inherent when a partner leaves, the final stanza kicks us with a series of questions, "Do you think of me only/as a woman who bakes,/who fries, who burns,/who stews in her own juices?"
It is an important book and a worthwhile read.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews