Pleasure Principle - by Madeleine Cravens (Paperback)

About the Book

"In her stunning debut collection, Madeleine Cravens explores desire in all its transgressive power and wildness. Pleasure and pain are inextricable in these carefully observed poems, capturing a young woman on the threshold of adulthood as she seeks to understand herself. With a hard-edged vulnerability and singularly bold style, Cravens is unsparing about the struggle to make sense of one's longings. An astonishing debut collection of poems about desire and the chaos of youth"--

Book Synopsis

An astonishing debut collection of poems about desire and the chaos of youth.

In her stunning debut collection, Madeleine Cravens explores desire in all its transgressive power and wildness. Pleasure and pain are inextricable in these carefully observed poems, capturing a young woman on the threshold of adulthood as she seeks to understand herself. With a hard-edged vulnerability and singularly bold style, Cravens is unsparing about the struggle to make sense of one's longings.

Taking us from the parks and plazas of Brooklyn to the freeways of California, these poems allow us to watch a life unfold where "womanhood felt like an incorrect container," and love is performed "in the historic way, with bartering and harsh alliances." As Cravens casts her questioning eye across the possibilities of queer relationships and the curious shapes of family bonds--both the ones we're born into and the ones we choose--she urges readers to consider how we become ourselves.

Moving, captivating, and funny, Pleasure Principle heralds the arrival of a fearless and vibrant new voice in American poetry.

Review Quotes

"There are many poets writing spare, hyper-efficient lyric, but you would be hard-pressed to find one as sure-footed and savvy, and relentlessly good as this one. Pleasure Principle both tightens the screw--or to use another portmanteau phrase, it does not let you off easy--and at the same time wakes up language to its tautest pleasures." --McSweeney's

"To blurb a poetry collection is often to participate in a tradition of commercial hyperbole that great poetry itself resists; books like Madeleine Cravens's brilliant and utterly crystalline debut make this contradiction all the starker. Here is a poetics of quiet resistance and shining anti-epiphany, of queer surplus matched with lyric understatement. Spare yet lush, cerebral yet sensual, Pleasure Principle draws our attention toward a world at once lovable and unlivable, where, if we are very attentive, we might find 'not the pleasure of lessons but the pleasure of errors.'" --Maggie Millner, author of Couplets

"In Madeleine Cravens's Pleasure Principle, a tough particularness operates perfectly in tandem with a subtle musicality and a relentlessness of vision, a commitment to saying what has been experienced just as it was experienced, and what has been imagined as if it had been experienced. And yet these poems are also poems that acknowledge the world as governed by possibility as much as by pattern--when Cravens writes, 'There was a world inside the world. I wanted the hard pit, ' she is writing her way toward a possible world, the world in the seed in the world. This book is itself such a seed, both the beginning of a poet and a renewal of poetry." --Shane McCrae, author of Pulling the Chariot of the Sun

"Madeleine Cravens's Pleasure Principle draws the world with an astounding clarity of vision, yet every setting is infused with tenderness. These are taut and quiet poems, driven by an exhilarating lyric sensibility. The book begins where a photograph would end--her lines hum with the frequency of unseen light, hidden desires, forgotten objects, and memories retrieved from the mystery of childhood. A truly wonderful debut announcing a poet assured of her voice." --Aria Aber, author of Hard Damage

"Beneath the understated precision of Madeleine Cravens's line is an electric current of desire--for truth, to touch. Images are rendered with archetypal, psychic potency. A pared sound is pierced by an embodied, epiphanic wisdom, how 'one could die without knowing this / the wild heart of all objects.' Poems written in the ruins. Afterlives. And, everywhere, something dark and gorgeous and burning inside the words." --Aracelis Girmay, author of the black maria

"Madeleine Cravens's Pleasure Principle is a book of here-and-gone places, of the living body as it passes through memory, desire, and transgression. This debut is a work of haunting beauty and humor. The kind of book you carry with you from airplane, to barstool, to Q train. The kind of book that lives rent-free in your chest." --Sam Sax, author of Pig