The Gates of Pearl

Decades in gestation, the riveting, poem-memoir THE GATES OF PEARL is woven together from a mother's Overeater's Anonymous journal written in the 1970s, mother-daughter telephone conversations, and the poet-daughter's exquisite verses... And here is the mother-daughter relationship with Pearly confessing her most private self to her grown child over the telephone. No attempt is made to prettify the mother's fragments and idiosyncratic stream-of-consciousness. Too much of Pearly's shimmering originality, her lyricism, and transgressive voice would be lost. Taboos of silence are broken. I leave the bed--I go towards an icy box--holding out its frozen breasts and erect Penis to me. The daughter responds in meticulous, impassioned verse that provides a counterpoint to the mother's flying-off-the-shelves imagery. Chiseled, Sappho-like in places, unscripted free-style in others, The Gates of Pearl is an impassioned lament of dark beauty. It is also a celebration. Listen to Pearly: My eyes were riveted on the huge banana trees... Lo and behold thru the dark purplish large leaves right before our eyes like a birthing came the stalk of bananas. I had seen Nature's unabashed sexual blaze of glory--an erection. -- Stephanie Emily Dickinson

There is no other poem on the face of the planet like this one. This is a poem that will blow the top of your head off. This is a poem in which the past is present and the present is in the past, because this poem makes the past seem so contemporary that the present feels less immediate. This is a poem written by the poet's mother in her journals, and the poet and her mother in telephone poems, and the poet in her mysterious, lyrical poems. All the voices, past and present, mingling together in this book-length poem creates a sound as piercing and clear as a scream. This is not a howl. This is a scream - a fantastic, feminist scream grounded in eating disorders, sexual frustration, divorce, failure, the difficulty of motherhood, profound disappointment and despair where the only hope is the truthfulness of the narrator, the goodness of her daughter, the determination of both of them, and the beauty of poetry. You want to read this poem despite its hard truths, because it is unlike anything you have ever read before. -- Dell Lemmon