RED SUGAR In her third collection, Beatty travels inside the body to the blood that codes us, moving beyond the language of post-confessionialism and into fourth-wave feminism, challenging notions of the "romantic" and the "brutal" and how they exist within us and between us. Red Sugar asks: how do we talk about the humanity that surfaces in the midst of transformation? We see woman as recorder of dreams and deeds of culture: one of "Blake's Angels" as a stripper heroin addict who is desired by the woman speaker; Beatty looks at transgression from the inside out in the title poem: "When I was young I was a comet/with an unending shimmering tail,/and I flew over the brokenness below/ that was my life." Blood as code, blood as ultimate storyteller, vault, and carrier of dreams. Yet there is luminosity in these waves of experience, as Beatty brings us a new way of looking at the ecstatic by standing outside of joy and rendering it alive. There is frenzy and there is a canopy of danger to this American version of the romantic, but it is this mosaic of immediacy that says all authentic experience has power and a bloodlife: its own legacy. Having mastered the art of fury, Jan Beatty does not merely write a poem, she wrenches it into being, slaps it on the page, applies the flames of her passions, then gentles it into the sweating fleshy sweetness of childhood hungers, longings inspired by loneliness or loss, starkly erotic yearnings - all served in deliciously monstrous pportions, to be savored like a long slow French, that perfect tongue of a kiss that sets the soul on throb. - Wanda Coleman What is it about the poems in Red Sugar, Jan Beatty's astonishing third collection, which brings to mind the incomparable music of Miles Davis? "It's just that I can't play like anybody else... I can't do anything like anybody else," Davis insisted. These poems go their own sure way, making their own fierce music, charting "the fluid stages of / empire and slavery" in the human body, yours and mine, as we rehearse our sometimes sorry but always necessary seductions. Unflinching, vulgar, yet oddly welcoming in the "biting joy" of their American riffs, these poems touch us here, and here, and even here. - Michael Waters Jan Beatty's Red Sugar is a hard rocking book, a gorgeous sexual book, a fearless way high up and way down deep rollercoaster book of poetry such as you never have read before and will want to read over and over. It is full of strong language and full of love, and I loved and admired it to the hilt. - Alicia Ostriker Red Sugar is tantalizing and forbidden, but it is no peepshow. The poems are raw, brash, and full of pluck, yet there is tenderness and honest emotion at the core. Jan Beatty reminds us that there is 'nothing between us and death but one inch.' She takes us to the edge of being and shows us our own quick mortal souls. Yes, there's rock music and prison sex--but do not think for a moment that this book is merely licentious. Beatty casts a broad canopy over human desire, and within the scope of experience, she finds, too, that we are innocent and sublime beings. A rich, rare treat, this Red Sugar. - D. A. Powell All work copyright © Jan Beatty 2024