Alexis Rhone Fancher tears the plain brown wrapper off erotica. She refuses to play safe, strips away pretense, intent on exposing the fragility, angst and longing lurking just below the sexual surface. EROTIC features poems and flash never before seen in any collection, as well as gems from Rhone Fancher's first two erotic offerings, How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen & other heart stab poems (2014) and Enter Here (2017). It includes the infamous "Sister Poems," all together for the first time. With her "take no prisoners" attitude, Rhone Fancher spares no one, least of all herself. As she's quoted in The Fem: "I write about women like me, women who own their sexuality and take responsibility for their choices. It may seem I'm writing about sex, but really, I'm writing about power. Who has it. How to get it. How to wield it. How to keep it." Come along with the author as she careens through her checkered past. Enjoy her misadventures. Cop a feel. Have a laugh. But reader beware: Alexis Rhone Fancher's wry confessional may do more than lubricate your libido. It just might steal your heart. |
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Sex is on the menu and will not be denied. Lush and meticulously crafted, these are poems that stand head to head with what Georgia O'Keefe brought to the canvas, Julia Child to haute cuisine. Black & white photos peppered throughout give EROTIC a whiff of the noir.
—Susan Tepper, author of What Drives Men and The Merrill Diaries
Alexis Rhone Fancher's Erotic: New & Selected Poems (NYQ Books, 2021) is a tenebrous midnight ramble—to borrow a term that describes the time after which traveling shows and carnivals got really risqué. As such, Erotic is a carnival-diary of a woman's recording the contours and landmarks and open range of her own frontiers. In "When the Handsome, Overgrown Samoan Boy Stands Again in Front of Your Glass-Walled Beach House in Venice & Begins to Masturbate, Never Taking His Eyes off You"—that title!—the sex is a gift that attends living in glass houses: "Don’t worry! His eyes will never leave your face. / No one will guess your truth." EROTIC is, also, a greatest hits of poems about personal integrity as much as anything. Time and time again, we're shown that, when it comes to human sexuality, More Than Enough is as near-at-hand as the healing power of a good fuck. That said, this is one hot book!
—Roy Bentley, finalist for the Miller Williams Prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City and winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize for Starlight Taxi
Alexis Rhone Fancher's poems are full of sex, lust, love, and outrage. But let us read carefully. It is also full of pain, mourning and loss, which are the erotic's hidden cousins. Fancher's poems shy from nothing—she gives you everything. And the book vibrates with the trembling emotion of place. L.A. The streets, the freeways, the dives, the people. She knows what L.A. means, what it stands for. It rages in the seams of her poems. It's L.A. for Crissakes, she says, and her stunning photographs—poems in themselves&mddash;that landmark the terrain of this book, attest to the deep symbiosis she has with the city. Her city now. "I eat Bukowski for breakfast," she tells us. And she does.
—Frank X. Gaspar, author of The Poems of Renata Ferreira and Late Rapturous
Alexis Rhone Fancher reminds us in this collection that each and every sexual encounter, even those that are imaginary, are adventures worth taking. She possesses the ability to describe male psychosexuality with the same level of insight that she brings to women. Even in those poems that are sustained by a residue of sexual anger or where love has gone horribly south, Alexis somehow invests them with the blessing of transformation that is available only to those willing to risk enough.
—Tony Magistrale, author of Dialogues Among Lost Tourists
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