Worldly Pleasures

by Allison Joseph

Worldly Pleasures is a book about pushing past tribulations to seek in play, in friendship, in relationship. Ranging from a memorable series of character portraits to sensual love poems, Allison Joseph's fifth full-length collection finds, in its clear, smooth lines, a way to celebrate the world despite its difficulties. Worldly Pleasures further establishes Joseph as one of the leading poets of her young generation.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Allison Joseph (born 1967) is an American poet, editor and professor. She is author of six poetry collections, most recently, My Father's Kites: Poems (Steel Toe Books, 2010).

Born in London to parents of Jamaican heritage, Allison Joseph grew up in Toronto, Canada, and the Bronx. She graduated from Kenyon College with a B.A., and from Indiana University with an M.F.A. She teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and is Director of the Young Writers Workshop at SIUC, which she founded in 1999: a four-day summer program for high school students. Many of SIUC's creative writing faculty and graduate students are involved with the workshop, and the student participants come from several states. In 1995, she was one of the founding editors of Crab Orchard Review as the magazine's poetry editor and has also worked as editor-in-chief since August 2001. She lives in Carbondale, Illinois.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Ned Balbo · Rating 5 out of 5]

The “worldly pleasures” of Allison Joseph’s poignant fifth collection are those of memory and the body: the “somersaults and cartwheels” that she “once turned through air,” the “double dutch/on street corners” or the stickball games of a city childhood; but these are less poems of nostalgia than poems of celebration that resurrect a world with tenderness and humor. Through poetry’s physicality--its organic, animating voice--Joseph relives her youthful “pleasure in sudden movement”: “To move that way again” would be “sheer joy,” she exclaims, and through these poems, in memory, she does (“Souvenirs”). Born in London to parents of Caribbean background, Joseph grew up during the late ’60’s and ’70’s in Toronto and the Bronx, but she evokes those years in ways that resonate for readers of any era. “Notes from Childhood” considers the entertainment that once surrounded Joseph: the girls’ magazines that segregated Black and White teen idols, the ’70’s “wardrobe of dashikis/and love beads” that Black T.V. characters wore, or “Teen Dream Malibu Barbie,” whose fantasy California lifestyle lay far from Orchard Beach, “the dark, dirty, dangerous waters/my family visited each summer.” Throughout the book, Joseph’s command of metaphor and syntax raises seemingly plain language to a subtle elegance. Eventually, she asserts, addressing self and reader, “Write me no more poems/of yearning, no more/desires spun thin and/secondhand...Give me music- brassy,/ugly and strong” (“Against Pathos”). This affectionate, humane collection is filled with just such music, not ugly so much as real: the voice of a woman for whom this flawed world remains cause for celebration.