Eve's Striptease

by Julia Kasdorf

"You have to admire a poet who can take an onion, the flu, houseguests, migraines, and a nurse's coat and turn them in to poetry. Of course, Kasdorf is using the concrete to get a deeper there's an amazement at life in these poems, and a hard-headed determination to make it work." --Library Journal "It may initially seem as though Kasdorf has meant to shock the home folks with her new book. Think of her overall Mennonites and sex, a novel connection. Yet Eve's Striptease uses these two lenses to focus on the world. However, viewing the book only in terms of ethnicity and biology trivializes what is a significant work by a brilliant young poet. . . . It is a book about coming to terms with one's sexuality and how that affects one's place in the world." --Pittsburgh Quarterly "Most readers will be grateful for the gift outright of Kasdorf's achingly beautiful language of desire and of a "full store" of unavoidable passings from discovery to dark discovery and from expectations and surprises of childhood to retrospections and surprises of adulthood." --Mennonite Quarterly Review "Crosshatched by body, spirit, and the relation between them; animated by bright instinctive exchanges between carnal and religious zones of experience; driven by an honest, explicitly female consciousness of what 'animal' and 'soul' might mean, the poems in Eve's Striptease keep pace with a considered life in its search for some consoling 'homeliness' in the world." --Eamon Grennan Julia Kasdorf grew up in Western Pennsylvania. Her previous collection, Sleeping Preacher, was the winner of the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was awarded the 1993 Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for New Writing. Eve's Striptease was named one of Library Journal's Top 20 Best Poetry Books of 1998. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and various anthologies and journals. She teaches at Messiah college and lives in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published February 5, 1998

Reviews

[Arnie Kahn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kasdorf is one of my favorite poets. Her poems are witty, accessible, and about everyday activities, but often with a twist at the end. Unusual, I think, from a person from a Mennonite background, much of her poetry speaks to sexual urges and desires. The poem titled, "Sinning," begins

When I was seven mom asked if I knew
what rabbits in the hutch were up to.
"Fucking" farm cousins told me long before.
"We call it intercourse," she said

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful book--so glad I read it!

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fortunately, Eve doesn't show up too much in these poems (can we give certain myths a break, please), for the majority of these poems capture a kind of wandering out of the paradise of childhood and Mennonite communities and in the much more gritty world of adulthood and Brooklyn. These are poems with an attention to the details of the world and the details of the self.

[John Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely collection, largely about the female experience of embodiment; a story of a childhood response to Snow White is a particular highlight.

[Andrew Shutes-David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few months ago I wrote a review that started with the following sentence: "Bram Stoker had an awesome Dickensian name, awesome enough, in fact, that he should have written himself into the novel, perhaps as the villain or as the ridiculous character who clenched his eyelids shut, punched his fist in the air, and shouted "I'm BRAM!" each time the vampire hunting gang destroyed a coffin or accomplished something heroic." My point there was that DRACULA was boring. It needed some extra flare, some action, something sexy and awesome.

However, after I published that review on Goodreads, a friend noted that the ittsy-bittsy preview that appears on Facebook only read "Bram Stoker had an awesome Dick..." Not quite the sexy I intended.

Then, a few weeks later, I downloaded and started reading the following three books: REAL SEX, PORNOGRAFIA, and EVE'S STRIPTEASE. I didn't think about it at the time, but it was starting to sound like I was on an erotica kick--literary erotica, of course.

But all of those books were recommended by friends who, as far as I know, aren't keen on the sex (as the primary plot point) scene. And if that's your scene, your genre of choice, then I'm afraid you'll find these books a bit too abstinent. REAL SEX, by Lauren Winner of GIRL MEETS GOD fame, talks somewhat candidly about sex, but really it's a dry treatise on why Christians should only have sex within marriage. I got it for free (I would never pay for REAL SEX. Ha ha errrr...), and I haven't finished it yet. PORNOGRAFIA is more about weird old guys getting titillated through social engineering than about what we today think of as pornography, and while there may be some indecent touching, there's not a single sex scene in the whole book, or at least not in my translation.

And that brings me to EVE'S STRIPTEASE. I suppose there are some sexy lines in this collection--it's a poetry collection; did I forget to mention that?--and a subset of the poems speak openly about the feminine body, but again, there was more sex in A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, with its persistently virgin narrator, than in EVE'S STRIPTEASE.

No, world, I am not exploring a new genre. Or at least not THAT new genre.

In some respects, however, poetry IS a new genre for me. Yes, I occasionally edit poetry at The Other Journal. Yes, I've read hundreds of poems in high school and college and at coffee shops and late at night on couches at friends' houses, but the idea of purchasing a poetry collection by someone I don't know and reading all of the poems therein is a relatively new one.

Perhaps this means I'm a poor judge of poetry. Perhaps this means I lack a spectrum for knowing where a collection falls in comparison to other comparable books. Or perhaps it means I see poems with fresh eyes or that I bring a prose reader's sensitivities to the poesy project.

Whatever the case, I can say that I liked EVE'S STRIPTEASE. I found my interest momentarily waning with the aforementioned feminine-focused poems (boo on me for being a prototypical male reader, I know), but Kasdorf quickly reeled me back in with her beautiful lines about family and city and universal longings. I don't know that I can describe what separates a good poem from a dazzling one, but I can say that this collection has an approachable blend of simplicity and image and experience and readaloudability that make it score well in the Andrew spectra of poetry analysis. And this collection includes lines like this "Every window in this apartment has bars, / and the door has a lock for each day / the Savior lay in the grave, / as though it’s that easy to know / what we’re supposed to keep out / and what we should try to keep in," or in an earlier poem, "If I forget thee / let my tongue forget the songs / it sang in this strange land / and my heart forget the secrets / only a stranger can learn."

So if you're looking for a lay, go elsewhere, but if you're looking to get your hands dirty with some good poetry check this one out.

[Jessie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful poems full of body & reconciliation with the body. This from "A Pass":

Forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive, I softly recite

among strangers, remembering
the hand of an older man

gliding up my thin dress.
I twist free of him,

keep speaking as if he is just
a rich family friend chatting,

and I am still safe
in the shape of my skin.

Of course, it sets me back,
as each death resurrects

the memory of all other deaths,
and you must return to mourn

your full store of passings afresh....

shame and rage, heavy as coins
sewn in the lining of an exile's coat....

[Melody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very rarely does a book of poetry grab me by the scruff of the neck. Even more rarely does a book of poetry grab me, kiss me, and compel me to stay with it--like Odysseus on Calypso's Island--even when people might swear I had better things to do. But this book of poetry called me like no other ever has, speaking to my embodied experience as a woman of faith who seems constantly sorting out disparate (often contradictory) messages about motherhood and scholarship, work and sex.

This collection of poems - highly readable, full of rich images, beautiful language, complex ideas - reminds me not just what it means to live my life but what it means to truly live in my life.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall a good collection of poetry but I wasn't particularly drawn into the poems and only two poems really resonated with me.

from The Sun Lover: "she knows / the sun is teaching her about love, / how it comes over your body / making every muscle go soft / in its pitiless gaze, // how it penetrates everything, / changing you into something dark / and radiant. She craves it,"

from Flammable Skirts Recalled: "you asked if I thought all the sadness of our twenties / might have been grief in advance. Maybe time isn't / continuous, and there are pains too great to be held / by the present."

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much for me to like here. Kasdorf writes about so much I like in poetry--the female experience, faith, immigrant experience etc. The first section is brutal and is sometimes hard to read (but contains some of my favorite stuff). The rest of the book is much quieter but none-the-less wonderful.

[Angélique (Angel) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 Stars. The strongest thing about this collection is that each poem alludes to something more expansive than its initial subject. One gets the sense of being connected not only to the specific experiences and emotions of each poem but also to the experiences and emotions of humanity.

[Robert Rhodes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Julia Kasdorf's finest so far

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wish I had it here with me to mention some of her lovely allusions. Very nice collection of poetry. Mostly positive too, which is nice, as it seems like so much modern poetry is very melancholy.

[Kelley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetry about love and loss. I liked her writing style. I'll look for more work by her.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Definition: To Fix" - One of the most thought provoking and beautiful poems of all time IMO. It inspired me to get an orange lily tattoo!

[marcus miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know that I am qualified to review poetry, but I didn't find this collection as enjoyable or thought provoking as I did Sleeping Preacher and The Body and the Book.

[Sara Lamers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely a poet to read more of.

[M]

... I press a key between each knuckle of my fist. / ... / and I rage against the vulnerable socket / I cannot gouge out of this body.