Love Comes First

January 1, 2009
Revered and reviled for her smart, sexy novels about the power of women, including her imaginative tribute to the first woman poet, Sapphos Leap (2003), Jong returns to poetry after a long hiatus. Expansive in her prose, she is pithyin her plumy poems, each word a gleaming drop of water, each line concise yet voluptuous. Her tone isteasing as she asks quintessential questions: As for love / why is it never enough / to save us? Jong is funny, knowing, and mischievous as she critiques Edith Wharton and Henry James and turns the word risotto into a love spell. She offers a cycle of lyrics to Aphrodite and muses over the mysteries of sleep and death. She is warrior brave in piercing poems about what it means to be Jewish and in poems aboutour recklessdestruction of the living earth. Jong is feline: curled up and purring on one page, leaping on another, claws and fangs bared. Sensual, wise, and gracefully artistic, she knows of what she writes. To live is to be / uncertain. / Certainty comes / at the end.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)