listen: here's a secret
Between the covers of AORTIC CAPRICE Gail reveals the stories of a woman "of a certain age" wrestling with her wayward heart: the death of an adult child, the fading of her own youth, and her attraction to much younger men. The poetry sweeps from mountain wilderness to the intimate terrain of a lover's body in an avalanche of transgressive desire. This poetry collection is adult in nature. What the critics say about AORTIC CAPRICE… "[In] Gail Sidonie Sobat's AORTIC CAPRICE ... I can see how the metaphor draws the curtain back on the overall structure of the book. The volume is broken (as the heart is broken) into two movements, diastole and systole, the heart muscle relaxing and contracting respectively." In the relaxing diastole movement, we have poems of letting go (of deceased loved ones), aging, autumn and harvest. The contracting systole movement returns us to the concerns of sexual love and desire, with in particular an honest, unapologetic, erotic poem on an older woman's desire for a younger man, 'forbidden fruit': 'had your eyes not sought me out / would your youth / have passed by not touching / mine passing? though we may be a string untuned / discordant with our universes / I'd like to weave with you / in and out of time and space / to warp and weft the bias / of this very narrow world.' " Remembering that there
are positive and negative, or apocalyptic and demonic, forms for
each variation, the structure of the book makes
an interesting
point of its own, that our hearts are bound to a cycle of desire
and release, attachment
and loss, and that the poems we write repeat, and help to see us
through, the intractable rhythm." Book Club Questions for Bookclubs and Readers To order AORTIC CAPRICE Contact Gail directly sobina@telusplanet.net |