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Reviews of Red Sugar
'Red Sugar,' by Jan Beatty
Bookstore and poet in war of words over reading
Poems Off the Straight and Narrow
Interview from "Around Town" on WQED, 89.3fm
Poet explores brutal emotions women seldom declare
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘Wild girl fire’ is what Jan Beatty calls it, ‘that white-hot tearing’ that ignites into art or self-destruction. Poetry against all odds. Poetry as the death-defying act. Poetry as the wild choice for a girl running reckless from the working class. Between odd jobs and odd loves, Beatty writes from the tender heart without flinching.
This is slap in the face, wake the fuck up and smell the roses poetry. this is pay attention Bub, or you’ll be in a jam poetry; poetry written in defiance of gravity and in the face of all the forces of our own desire that want to drag us down. And underneath all of this wildness is a true love and care for craft, and the anxious, bluesy rhythm of good talk, like a river.
What is the body? In Jan Beatty's courageous, beautiful, and harsh new book, Boneshaker, the body is as horrifyingly without boundaries as the cosmos, as constricted as a prison cell. Language, too, is a body. At times it is stitched up tight in the strictures of narrative. At other times, chopped and opened up, not even a sentence survives intact. Restless with complacency and restriction, this book ricochets among a multitude of forms, tones, subjects. Boneshaker is a fierce, intelligent, terrifying interrogation of categories, among them the category of the book itself. Nothing is beyond the reach of this splendid new work.
There is a school of poetry where the poems have content, where they communicate, where beauty is not forgotten. It is about work, family, and the lost towns. Grief. Jan is a central figure in this school.
Praise for Mad River:
“It is in her keen mental note taking that the real madness – that is, passion – lies. In every poem, she keeps her fury constrained but omnipresent, so that is resembles a covered dog’s warning growl, yet she hints of happier possibilities, too.’
“Raw, energetic, gritty, risky, sexy, and real…. The power of these short narratives is often cumulative, building a vision of a world seen through the eyes of a wanderer, a woman, a waitress.”
“I would shout from my back porch ‘Read these poems!’ (if I knew you would listen); they are funny and smart, lush and tough-minded, wacky in that particular American wackiness, graceful, burning, alive.” –Bruce Weigl
“A fresh voice with rough edges, shamelessly bringing sex, fear, compassion, the hurt you feel for others and the self – and the grit and drive of working class lives – into language.”
“There are so many tributaries connecting Mad River to our everyday world. Jan Beatty isn’t afraid to venture out into the quicksand that troubles our national psyche at the edge of this millennium…. [Her] poems speak to us head-on, with courage and a contemporaneous eloquence.”
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