Untamed Arabesque, includes shipping
Untamed Arabesque, includes shipping
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If Whitman sang the body electric, Marianne Peel choreographs its current. In Untamed Arabesque, the body is not merely celebrated—it is opened, unwrapped, revealed in all its ache and exultation. Skin becomes sensate narrative: it reaches, recoils, remembers, and ultimately rejoices in connection. Peel’s poems are charged with intimacy, illuminating the many forms of embodiment—lovers hungry for touch, the dying poised for return, the tender topography of women’s bodies, the flirtational grace of strangers across restaurant tables. This is a collection lush with physicality and meaning-making, where contact becomes communion. Each poem pulses with the reminder: we are deeply, undeniably alive—and we are made more so by each other.
Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr., poet, author of Gay Poems for Red States
From smoky dance floors in juke joints and honky-tonks to prom night and P.F. Chang’s, Marianne Peel can find or create sensual magic across space, location, and time. Her work teems with red feather boas and musical rivers of desire. Yet it is not only the romantic erotic that powers these poems; Peel explores as well the fragrant lust of meadow and flower; the physical pleasure of connection between life-long friends; the skin-and-heart attachment of mother and child. The myriad aspect of love and loss and seduction are woven through these poems, line after line. Laura Apol, author of Cauterized, former Poet Laureate of Lansing, Michigan
Of all the brilliant poets I read, study with, esteem, Marianne is at the top of my admiration list for the magical way she weaves imagery into her poems. She ignites her readers to lose a sense of ordinary time, and travel with her deep into her narratives. With her new collection of poetry, Marianne’s gift of guiding the reader viscerally into each of her poems continues to astound. Untamed Arabesque at its very core is deeply sensuous. Balinese women making offerings, washer women making music, dancing in the rain, daughters coming of age, the wonder of place. If you dare to read Untamed Arabesque, you will find yourself as if in a juke joint dancing, sweating, celebrating a new or renewed sexual awakening. You, too, will understand desire as a sacred aspect of the Goddess Herself.
Wilderness Sarchild, poet and playwright, author of Old Women Talking
As Robert Frost lamented, “Nothing gold can stay,” but Marianne Peel’s sensuous collection, Untamed Arabesque, offers readers a technicolored tribute to life that brings us love, connection, and celebratory sparkles. Peel’s magnificent poems apprehend the complexity and pathos of the human condition but also leave one longing for “a summer slog of a night” in Po’ Monkey’s Juke Joint or a brilliant blue evening swaying to “the drum circle of cicadas, before unpacking a hatbox full of Michigan autumn.” This is a collection chock-full of images you will savor. Peel conjures up pure joie de vivre in Untamed Arabesque—a genuine delight! Kelly Fordon, poet, author of What Trammels the Heart
