Deep Kiss

Poetry. "'Life, / whoremaster, / put your tongue / in my mouth / so what I tell / has no limits / but the strength / of your desire': so begins Sherry Kearns' raw and probing collection, DEEP KISS, which takes us places most poets allude to, decorate or altogether avoid. The deep kiss here loosens the tongue by reaching past it. Each poem is a deep kiss that compels us with unflinching intimacy empty with possibility to find Eros when no other god / will do. Kearns descends into the...
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Poetry. "'Life, / whoremaster, / put your tongue / in my mouth / so what I tell / has no limits / but the strength / of your desire': so begins Sherry Kearns' raw and probing collection, DEEP KISS, which takes us places most poets allude to, decorate or altogether avoid. The deep kiss here loosens the tongue by reaching past it. Each poem is a deep kiss that compels us with unflinching intimacy empty with possibility to find Eros when no other god / will do. Kearns descends into the Underworld like a female Orpheus after her late friend and mentor, William Bronk, only to discover that the kiss hello is also the kiss goodbye, 'the one / becoming the other as soon as it happens.' Kearns emerges with a memory that whispers / in his old velvet voice, 'Come again.' Driven by the longing for full disclosure she can't help but descend again and again, and take us with her. The poems in this book kiss us like the moon on water, a light that illuminates without dispelling shadows, and we must decide / how to embrace it. DEEP KISS is such an embrace."—Paul Pines