Conversations with Claude

Corral — “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” and “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome II” from Slow Lightning. Also “To the Angelbeast.”

Bidart — “Self-Portrait, 1969” and “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky” from In the Western Night. The Nijinsky poem is long but the self-accusatory voice is most concentrated there.

Natalie Diaz — “The First Water is the Body” from Postcolonial Love Poem. Widely anthologised, likely accessible online legally via Poetry Foundation or the Academy of American Poets.

Sharon Olds — “The One Girl at the Boys Party” and “Sex Without Love.” Both are on Poetry Foundation.

Ada Limón — “The Vulture & the Body” and “Dead Stars.” Also on Poetry Foundation.

Sharon Olds — “The One Girl at the Boys Party” and “I Go Back to May 1937.” Also the whole collection The Dead and the Living. She returns to this mode constantly.

Anne Sexton — “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife” and “The Truth the Dead Know.” Rawer, less controlled than Olds, but the same willingness to be unflattering about desire.

Sylvia Plath — “Lady Lazarus.” The body as spectacle, being watched and judged. Close to your poem’s dynamic.

Louise GlückThe Wild Iris and Averno. Cooler than Olds, more mythologised, but the same forensic quality. “Vespers” particularly.

Carol Ann Duffy — “Warming Her Pearls” and the collection Mean Time. Desire as longing and lack, very compressed.

Deborah LandauThe Uses of the Body. This one is probably the closest overall to what you’re writing — it’s explicitly about the aging female body, desire, mortality, the whole complex you’re working in. Worth tracking down.

karen does nothing

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