Where You Live

Martinis and fantastic breasts. A wild wedding hangover. Pink angora and instructing six women / to write tercets on snow. In lesbian love-poems, conversations, intimate jokes from a hundred parties, five prisons, and three beloved bars, Jill McDonough's second book tells where we live, and how: each day fresh with the gift of it. Fierce/nose-sting of tears, quick breath out of nowhere. Often frankly autobiographical, her poems are also peopled with others' stories. Some are familiar Cary Grant and Charles Darwin, Sappho and Hildegard von Bingen. Others we come to know: prison inmates Julie and Andrea, friends comforting in kitchens or riotous in the yard, the little Chinese lady from the Lucky Star kiosk. McDonough is honest with them: stitches their actual words into her poems, understands their motives and her own. This poetry is vivid with reality, even where the subjects are pictures: Mary in an illuminated Annunciation suspicious / in her lapis robes, her double chin doubting, perhaps / one eyebrow raised; or a small, unseemly Venus, hair in pearls holding the dead Adonis and furious at death and grief. Above all there are poems of love and desire I, Jill McDonough, have something to declare: je t'aime, je t'adore, Josey ardent, funny, and erotically charged: For better or worse. For root canal, for laughing on the high speed ferry to the cape. My mouth on your neck, say. My hand on your emerald-cut calf.