Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected

by Erica Jong Narrated by Erica Jong

Overview

Although most famous for her bestselling fiction, including Fear of Flying and Any Woman's Blues, Erica Jong started her publishing career as a poet. The celebrated author enjoys an international reputation for her verse. An essential collection of poetry, Becoming Light includes early poems previously uncollected in book form, selections from her previous books, and many new poems. Erica Jong's poetry exhibits her rare gifts for inventiveness, wit, vigor, honesty, and accessibility. Critics have generously praised Jong's unique poetic voice.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175289566
Publisher:	Phoenix Books, Inc.
Publication date:	01/01/1992
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Lullabye for a Dybbuk

The old self
like a dybbuk
clutching at my heel.
She wants to come back.
She is digging
her long red nails
into the tender meat of my thighs...
She tweaks my clit,
hoping that my sexaholic self
will surface
and take, me back, back, back

to the land of fuck,
where, crazed with lust
come over and over again,
going nowhere.

The old self
does not like
her displacement.
She resents the new tenant
sprucing up
her disorderly house.

She resents
the calm woman
nourishing her roses,
her daughter, herdogs,
her poems, her passionate

friendships.
She wants chaos
and angst and Liebestod.
She claims
she can't write
without them.

But the new tenant
is wise to her tricks.
Disorder is not Poetry,
she says. Pain
is not love.
Love flowers; love gives
without taking;
love is serene
and calm.

I talk to the dybbuk:

My darling dybbuk,
I Will love you
into submission.
Tweak me, I will only
caress you.
Claw me, I will only
kiss you back.

For what I have learned
let's me love
even my demon.

Demon--I love you
for you are,
mine,
I say..

And demons die
of love.

Becoming Light. Copyright © by Erica Jong. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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