Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 96
- Language: English
- Published: July, 2013
- ISBN: 978-1-939929-02-0
Praise
“Life, / whoremaster, / put your tongue / in my mouth / so what I tell / has no limits / but the strength / of your desire . . . : so begins Sherry Kearns’ raw and probing collection, DEEP KISS, which takes us places most poets allude to, decorate or altogether avoid. The deep kiss here loosens the tongue by reaching past it. Each poem is a deep kiss that compels us with unflinching intimacy empty with possibility to find Eros when no other god / will do. Kearns descends into the Underworld like a female Orpheus after her late friend and mentor, William Bronk, only to discover that the kiss hello is also the kiss goodbye, “the one / becoming the other as soon as it happens.” Kearns emerges with a memory that whispers / in his old velvet voice, ‘Come again’. Driven by the longing for full disclosure she can’t help but descend again and again, and take us with her. The poems in this book kiss us like the moon on water, a light that illuminates without dispelling shadows, and we must decide / how to embrace it. DEEP KISS is such an embrace.” – Paul Pines
“She is downright and forthright.” —William Bronk
“With a disarmingly light touch and an intriguing array of extended metaphors, Sherry Kearns engages a host of contraries, among them Eros and mortality, language and silence, being and emptiness. A master of the epigrammatic, she captivates with wordplay and paradox, but never gratuitously. Every move counts, every image illuminates. Each of her poems is an intricate journey towards essential insight.” —Henry Lyman
Excerpt
Answer To Dr. Rhodes
Did Yeats go to bed with Maude Gonne?
It doesn’t matter,
he wanted to.
Barstools and beds
are made hot
with things undone:
poems written,
whole lives or part
lived under a shadow
or in the light
of a single act’s possibility.
I am not sorry for that.
Author
Sherry Moore Kearns’ writing has appeared in the following publications: Transition, Blueline, Poetry New York, The Glens Falls Review, Sagetrieb, The Greenfield Review, North Country Review, The Body of This Life (Talisman House, 2001) and The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (Facts on File, Inc., 2005).
She is the author of the chapbooks Sister (Poetry New York, 1999) and The Ginko at 57 Pearl St. (James L. Weil, 2005). SUNY Adirondack published her essays Conversations About Poetry as part of their poetry and art series inspired by the William Bronk Collection.
A past recipient of a grant from New York State’s Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) program, Kearns also received the William Bronk Foundation prize for her memoir Meeting Bill.
