Synopsis
As its title proclaims, Eve’s Striptease delivers a female voice that seeks to “find out for (her)self/ all the desires a body can hold.” Through artful acts of revelation and concealment, these poems test experience against the notions of love and loss that tradition and religion have taught us. These narrative and lyric poems celebrate desire, marriage, and domestic life; they visit sexual terror and consider sickness and death. Construing all of life as a journey that takes us from innocence to knowledge, this work suggests that the maps that we need for this journey may be found written on our own bodies. Kasdorf writes of a life’s migrations, tracing paths that joyfully enlarge our definitions of love and longing - sometimes embracing conventional values and sometimes subverting them.
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About the Author
Julia Spicher Kasdorf is the author of Sleeping Preacher, Eve’s Striptease, Poetry in America, and Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, a documentary project created in collaboration with photographer Steven Rubin. She has also published a collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, and a biographical study, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American.
Reviews
paper 0-8229-5668-3 The lightly confessional tone of this second book by the Messiah College teacher draws on the poets limited vocabulary for describing her bodily self-exploration and her rage at those whove transgressed her person. Sinning suggests that poor sexual educationand repressive religious valuesexplain the poets lust, not for boys, but for the ravishings of safe sunlight. In Ghost, A Pass, and Bulbs, she rails against those who groped her as a girl, and laments her own vulnerable socketclearly never finding a language equal to her anger. Kasdorfs mostly plodding poems also record her time spent in Brooklyn, where the sounds and colors challenge the drabness of her Protestant background. But, even amidst the ethnic whirl and tumble, Kasdorfs modesty and naivet prevail and prevent real passion. Her idyll of Mom and Dad, and her aesthetic of Mennonite simplicity, while charming in their way, fail to salvage these rhythmless narratives. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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