Song of Songs: A Poem

Description

I hold on to everything. Will you please help me let go? . . . This is what makes sense to me. Nothing else does. You're the only one I want to talk to. You're the only one I like talking to. You are the only one who understands me. You are the only one who makes me make sense. Even though I never make sense. But you know. In the spirit of the biblical Song of Solomon, Song of Songs, Sylvie Baumgartel's powerful debut, takes the subjects of love and worship, of power and submission, and brings them to the desperate, wild spaces of the speaker's domestic life. With a voice at once precise and oneiric, Baumgartel explores the landscapes of sex and desire in this groundbreaking book-length poem.

Sylvie Baumgartel lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Subtropics, Raritan, and The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from "The Paris Review".

The conventional power dynamics of heterosexual love appear in grotesque extremity ('I want to live forever chained at your feet'), but Sylvie's wit and charm make them more farcical than troubling. The result is a study of devotion and a celebration of the rewards that come from loving with abandon. --The New Yorker Baumgartel dodges nothing; instead, in a superheroic move, she grabs the bullet from air thick with tradition and history and swallows it whole . . . her language doubles back and takes up space without apology--a radical act for a femme-presenting speaker when so often women and nonbinary people are forced to be quiet, to be small. Paired with identity, the poem's extremity becomes a political act. --Kate O'Donoghue, The Rumpus