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Cactus as Bad Boy
Frank and funny, Cactus as Bad Boy sings in the light of a closely-observed world. In these poems Vespoli explores what it means to be a woman in modern-day America, dating again after a long marriage, finding love amidst COVID, quarantines, zoom, and the “masked employees at Jiffy Lube.” She moves seamlessly between the outer world and intimate revelations; when she considers how she’s “gone in and out / of love with the penis / depending on who / it was attached to,” her candor makes me feel less alone. Cactus as Bad Boy is an absolute delight!
—Michaela Carter , author of Leonora In the Morning Light
These delicious, darkly humorous poems offer an intimate look at love, loss, solitude, kids, dogs, men, women, and the whole catastrophe. Playfully inventive in language and form, they invite us to romp and wrestle, then leave little puppy teeth marks on our heart. Love bites.
—Alison Luterman, author of In the Time of Great Fires
—Michaela Carter , author of Leonora In the Morning Light
These delicious, darkly humorous poems offer an intimate look at love, loss, solitude, kids, dogs, men, women, and the whole catastrophe. Playfully inventive in language and form, they invite us to romp and wrestle, then leave little puppy teeth marks on our heart. Love bites.
—Alison Luterman, author of In the Time of Great Fires
68 pages, Paperback
Published July 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 30, 2022
Bad Boys are also known as Scamps, Ne'er-Do-Wells, Lady-Killers, Rogues, and Pricks. And so the cover for Susan Vespoli's spicy-hot CACTUS AS BAD BOY has a purplish, phallic, spine-festooned bad boy of a cactus. The luridity of the cactus is emphasized with the green background of the cover. The book's cover promises hot stuff with a Southwestern flavor.
And Ms. Vespoli delivers hot stuff, to be sure. Sometimes the heat is the body heat of a woman wrapping her lap around a dude taking her on a motorcycle ride. Sometimes the heat is fury at a man who passively abandons her by presenting himself wedding-ringless upon her arrival after an eager two and a half hours of her driving to see him. There are lust heat, bitter-tears heat, obsessive-focus heat and jealousy heat as intense as July in the Valley of the Sun, where Ms. Vespoli resides. And the language that stokes the heat is spare, descriptive and immediate. She sits you at a table in a restaurant where her lover is flirting with a breasty server who subsequently brings her the wrong entree with a Whoops that seems a bit accusatory--DID you really order that? The server's breasts are described as Cantaloupes, which seems a deliberate choice not only of provocative roundness but abrasive surface texture.
One heart-wrenching poem, "Bagged During Quarantine," is remindful of the show tune "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair," but with a seriousness of cold fury. "All his clothes and shoes bagged/in Hefty black plastic. Closet emptied/and wiped down of his smell, like after/a death, except he's still breathing..." The urge to eliminate an ex-partner from her existence is betrayed by the persistent memory of what drew her to him.
Ms. Vespoli is a magician with wordplay. She takes a restrictive genre like the abecedarian, an acrostic form of twenty-six lines that starts with letter A on the first line and presents the alphabet in order till the last line, which begins with a Z. But she DOUBLES DOWN on the form, and the last letter in the first line is a Z, and the alphabet walks backwards in successive lines until the very last letter of the very last line is an A. When a poet meets that challenge, the real, bigger challenge is to make the poem read as though no such restriction exists, so that if someone hears the poem read aloud, the lines flow, and there's no telltale clumsiness. Ms. Vespoli succeeds magnificently in achieving that flow.
And she has also taken the Triolet form and in eight lines, some repeated, wrought a gemstone of desire-by-implication with remarkably few words. Reading "Remember Triolet" is likely to trigger an erogenous response in those readers with a susceptibility to hypnotism, and perhaps in some with no such susceptibility.
Conclusion: This is a book for fans of eroticism of the softer, yet deeper, variety. It is more honest and less gawdy than Erica Jong's FEAR OF FLYING, more to-the-point and less dated and windy than THE MEMOIRS OF CASANOVA, more realistic and less stabby than LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES. Read it and weep, and laugh, and sigh.
And Ms. Vespoli delivers hot stuff, to be sure. Sometimes the heat is the body heat of a woman wrapping her lap around a dude taking her on a motorcycle ride. Sometimes the heat is fury at a man who passively abandons her by presenting himself wedding-ringless upon her arrival after an eager two and a half hours of her driving to see him. There are lust heat, bitter-tears heat, obsessive-focus heat and jealousy heat as intense as July in the Valley of the Sun, where Ms. Vespoli resides. And the language that stokes the heat is spare, descriptive and immediate. She sits you at a table in a restaurant where her lover is flirting with a breasty server who subsequently brings her the wrong entree with a Whoops that seems a bit accusatory--DID you really order that? The server's breasts are described as Cantaloupes, which seems a deliberate choice not only of provocative roundness but abrasive surface texture.
One heart-wrenching poem, "Bagged During Quarantine," is remindful of the show tune "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair," but with a seriousness of cold fury. "All his clothes and shoes bagged/in Hefty black plastic. Closet emptied/and wiped down of his smell, like after/a death, except he's still breathing..." The urge to eliminate an ex-partner from her existence is betrayed by the persistent memory of what drew her to him.
Ms. Vespoli is a magician with wordplay. She takes a restrictive genre like the abecedarian, an acrostic form of twenty-six lines that starts with letter A on the first line and presents the alphabet in order till the last line, which begins with a Z. But she DOUBLES DOWN on the form, and the last letter in the first line is a Z, and the alphabet walks backwards in successive lines until the very last letter of the very last line is an A. When a poet meets that challenge, the real, bigger challenge is to make the poem read as though no such restriction exists, so that if someone hears the poem read aloud, the lines flow, and there's no telltale clumsiness. Ms. Vespoli succeeds magnificently in achieving that flow.
And she has also taken the Triolet form and in eight lines, some repeated, wrought a gemstone of desire-by-implication with remarkably few words. Reading "Remember Triolet" is likely to trigger an erogenous response in those readers with a susceptibility to hypnotism, and perhaps in some with no such susceptibility.
Conclusion: This is a book for fans of eroticism of the softer, yet deeper, variety. It is more honest and less gawdy than Erica Jong's FEAR OF FLYING, more to-the-point and less dated and windy than THE MEMOIRS OF CASANOVA, more realistic and less stabby than LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES. Read it and weep, and laugh, and sigh.
August 17, 2022
I love this book! It's like sitting down with a friend, a true original, who is honest, witty, rueful, passionate, and a really good poet. Susan Vespoli takes uson a ride through a great romance after a crappy marriage, crisscrossing the country, whale watching, kissing, but then the toll taken by COVID-19, which was hard on so many relationships. We sense how utterly real she is, spontaneous, emotional, loyal, insightful, and above all honest with herself (and us). Her memorable details stay with me, full of color and imagination. Just as we do, she hangs in there, finding consolation in granddaughter, dogs, friends. Ultimately this gem of a book celebrates it all.
July 19, 2022
Susan Vespoli has an eye for striking details. In poems that showcase present-day dating, love, loss and their aftermaths, she writes with frankness and unrepentant humor. Here, with a good deal of irony, is the woman who wants "to smash the glass/Buddha head into my now X's noggin" when he casually ends their relationship. By the time she explains that she "tore off our bed sheets/and bought a pink set", reader, you'll be cheering for and with her. CACTUS AS BAD BOY is a deliciously fun and funny book of poems.
September 3, 2022
Susan Vespoli's second full-length collection rises to the occasion, stands at attention...but all kidding aside, its a heart wrenching contemplation on a broken love affair, with a guy who, well, optimizes the expression "all about me." There's humor here too, lots of it. I laughed a lot, sighed and sympathized, and admired the hell out of these raw, honest, beautifully rendered poems.
January 16, 2023
This books combines passion, humor, anger, and pain to convey the complexity of romance and the nuance within relationship.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews