Armed Love

by Eleanor Lerman

Eleanor Lerman's first book of poetry is an astonishing accomplishment. Hallucinatory, yet intimately in touch with their sources, her poems focus on homosexuality and insanity, cruelty and degradation, bitterness and terror, in a Manhattan demimonde where people react to each other in violent need because they no longer have any choice or even want a choice, accepting, embracing a survival beyond desire, beyond reason. The dramatic contrast between the poet's quite elegant line and the sordid world of which she writes, between the mirroring coruscations of her images and the tortured complexity from which they spring, creates a nightmare vision at once reminiscent of the French decadents and of hard rock.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Eleanor Lerman is a writer who lives in New York. Her first book of poetry, Armed Love (Wesleyan University Press, 1973), published when she was twenty-one, was nominated for a National Book Award. She has since published four other award-winning collections of poetry—Come the Sweet By and By (University of Massachusetts Press, 1975); The Mystery of Meteors (Sarabande Books, 2001); Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds (Sarabande Books, 2005); and The Sensual World Re-Emerges (Sarabande Books, 2010), along with The Blonde on the Train (Mayapple Press, 2009) a collection of short stories. She was awarded the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Nation magazine for the year's most outstanding book of poetry for Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds and received a 2007 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her first novel, Janet Planet, based on the life of Carlos Castaneda, was published by Mayapple Press in 2011. Her latest collection of poetry, Strange Life,was published by Mayapple in 2015. Since then, her novel, Radiomen (The Permanent Press, 2016) was awarded the John W. Campbell Prize for the Best Book of Science Fiction. Her next novel, The Stargazer's Embassy, was released in July 2017. Her most recent novel, Satellite Street, will be released in October 2019.

Reviews

[Julene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read years ago and loved this book, plan to read it again.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

~3.75