Hyperallergic Reviews New Poetry Collections by Uche Nduka and Catherine Wagner

At Hyperallergic, Mark Scroggins reviews two new poetry collections: Uche Nduka's Facing You (City Lights, 2020) and Catherine Wagner's Of Course (Fence, 2020). Of Nduka's collection, Scroggins writes: "The bulk of the poems in Facing You, as the title implies, are love lyrics of one sort or another, poems addressed to a beloved." Further: 

The phrase “facing you” can designate both a stance toward another and — not to put too fine a point on it — a sex position; and a great number of the poems take us into the bedroom (or the floor of the study, or the kitchen, or wherever the muse seizes the poet and his partner). These are, as “No Replication” has it, “poems in various states / of undress.”

Nduka’s erotic poems are gentle, tender, and, for the most part, quite hot. There are moments of explicit description, outright tellings of the acts in progress — “Keep parting my buttocks / with scented fingers” (“Double Act”); “Juice alone does / not define us as you / sit on my face” (“A Return to Beauty”) — but such moments are surprising when they crop up, piquant or musty turns, unexpected and emphatic shots of physical punctation. More often, the poems’ erotic elements are part of a more general heightened, sexualized atmosphere, a kind of free-floating horniness or “beautiful confusion” (“In a Textile Mill”) in which the desire to merge with the beloved is inextricable from the desire to create. This is erotics as poetics: “At the peak / of writing,” Nduka writes in “Table of Noon,” “a blank paper / becomes wet.” “This poem smells / of both of us” (“Of Imprinting”).

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