Grasping Men's Metaphors by Sharon H Nelson
Grasping Men’s Metaphors is a complex, difficult, and sometimes very funny book, most obviously “a collapsed novel,” the term Kenneth Radu used in “Speaking Daggers: The Poetry Of Sharon H. Nelson,” an overview that appeared in Matrix. The book is divided into three sections and provides copious endnotes for its many scriptural, liturgical, and literary references. The introductory section, “Amazons and Astronauts,” provides a feminist frame that is followed by “Profanities,” full of verses “ribald and bitchy” in the tradition of Dorothy Parker. The final and longest section, towards which the whole book moves, is “Sacraments,” set on a line from Song Of Songs: “Let him give me of the kisses of his mouth.” “Sacraments” includes the long poem “Song of Innocence and Experience” set on a text from Blake and another from Corinthians.
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