Red Sugar

What is it about the poems in Red Sugar, Jan Beatty's astonishing third collection, that brings to mind the incomparable music of Miles Davis? 'It's just that I can't play like anybody else . . . I can't do anything like anybody else,' Davis insisted. These poems go their own sure way, making their own fierce music, charting 'the fluid stages of / empire & slavery' in the human body, yours and mine, as we rehearse our sometimes sorry but always necessary seductions. Unflinching, vulgar, yet oddly welcoming in the 'biting joy' of their American riffs, these poems touch us here, and here, and even here.

Jan Beatty's Red Sugar is a hard rocking-book, a gorgeous sexual book, a fearless way high up and way down deep roller-coaster book of poetry such as you never have read before and will want to read over and over. It is full of strong language and full of love, and I loved and admired it to the hilt.

Having mastered the art of fury, Jan Beatty does not merely write a poem, she wrenches it into being, slaps it on the page, applies the flames of her passions, then gentles it into the sweating fleshy sweetness of childhood hungers, longings inspired by loneliness or loss, starkly erotic yearnings—all served in deliciously monstrous portions, to be savored like a long slow French, that perfect tongue of a kiss that sets the soul on throb.

This electric, nerve-jangling collection revels in and sometimes rails against the glorious mess of inhabiting a body. . . often raw, and full of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, but they're also shockingly soft and tender.

The boldly sexual first person narratives in 'Red Sugar' are absolutely riveting, artfully fleshed-out poems which generate fear for the characters' safety.

Bold, brutal, honest . . . A fiercely inventive, intimate, and visionary book.

'Red Sugar' marches into the center of the gritty side of life and stays, shining stage lights on the personas who exist there, drawing them into character with clear and hard language. Beatty's profiles of fear, exploitation, sexuality, abuse, drugs, and death give voice to complex lives full of contradicitions.

A fearless collection. The poems seem to carve out homes inside of women's bodies and fill them up with the words. Only the words are not comfortable at all, and that's the draw to this book.