In Domain of Perfect Affection, Robin Becker explores the conditions under which we experience and resist in beauty salon, summer camp, beach, backyard, or museum; New York or New Mexico. “The Mosaic injunction against the graven image” inspires meditations on drawings by Durer, Evans, Klee, Marin, and del Sarto. To the consolations of art and human intimacy, Becker brings playfulness–“Worry stole the kayaks and soured the milk”–suffused with “Worry wraps her long legs around me, promises to be mine forever.” In “The New Egypt,” the narrator mines her family’s “From my father I learned the dignity of exile and the fire of acquisition, not to live in places lightly, but to plant the self like an orange tree in the desert.” Becker’s shapely stanzas–couplets, tercets, quatrains, pantoum, sonnet, syllabics–subvert her colloquial diction, creating a seamless merging of subject and form. Luminous, sensual, these poems offer sharp pleasures as they argue, elegize, mourn, praise, and sing.

Domain of Perfect Affection (Pitt Poetry Series) PDF

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