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Praise of Home in Three days. Don't Wash.
By Linda
Smukler
"1966:
on my tiny teen phonograph I played the yellow Atco single, "When
a Man Loves a Woman" till its grooves went faint, moved beyond words
by it message of strength and passion through weakness and chains. Now
Linda Smukler has re invented butch desire as a passionate amalgam of
abjection, power and trembling knees. She knows the doubt and fear behind
every stern visage the restless tugs of absence that surge beneath identity.
Smukler is the Percy Sledge of lesbian butch femme. Cri-de-coeur écriture."
– Kevin Killian
"There's a photograph in here that's hard to read at first. Then
suddenly you see it's two, imposed on one another: portraits of Linda
Smukler and Gertrude Stein. Stein hovers behind, above, beneath these
brazen texts. Like her modernist forebear, Smukler uses the most direct
and plain American idiom to render the complexity and anguish, and the
humor of desire."
-- Rebecca Brown
"The subject is sex--of these written things. I won't call them poems
or prose, to tell you the truth I think it's secret speech gone public.
Linda Smukler talks us through the rooms of sex, along telephone wires,
to hotel rooms and rustic streets. And a terrifying absence looms alongside
all its cagey fullness--the missed message, the desperation, the erratic
fumblings towards orgasm or whatever. It's lesbian sex, lesbian speech,
the bubbling details of a life lived and spoken, who has a job, is married,
owns a dog, drinks juice and tea, drives a car and is utterly totally
obsessed with sex. It's disturbingly true. If sex has a flag, this is
it."
– Eileen Myles
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