Rising Venus: Poems

by Kelly Cherry

Book Overview

With Rising Venus Kelly Cherry reveals the fearsome beauty, vulnerability, and complexity of women's experience. Cherry masterfully re-creates the full spectrum of the female psyche, from looming madness to harrowing self-knowledge made bearable, even exhilarating, through the poet's remarkable range and skill.

The book's journey is an ascension from mysterious and overwhelming depths of despair and anguish to a place of peace and perspective...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080712768X
• ISBN13: 9780807127681
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A Poetry Collection I Can't Live Without

I LOVE this collection. Very few authors rival Cherry's ability to write about the experience of being a woman with humor, dignity, kindness, sadness, and truth.

You will be honored to own a copy.

Working in a public library, I read voraciously. Poets are my people, and Kelly Cherry is my poet. This, her latest collection, is the book I fell into, this summer, this autumn, and now winter. I've carried my copy to Albuquerque, to Michigan, to work. Simply, it's the company I want to keep.The title poem revises the myth of Venus into human form-- a women who rises into herself:"Myth is the portal / through which we pass, / becoming human at last, / rising out of dream / and desire to realms / of reality, where love, / a woman, by Jove, / survives, strong and free, / engendering her own destiny".Certainly, there is despair in this book. There is also a miracle which unfolds itself within the arc. Right at its center, the line where despair meets peace in the heart of a woman is fully, uniquely and authentically rendered.The skill of this poet is unreal, really. At the risk of sounding dramatic: I cannot fathom a world without these poems. They belong to every place. They alter my space, my mode, my identity, and my regard for other people.