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from “Mount Fuji”

A draughtsman’s draughtsman, Hokusai at 70
thought he’d begun to grasp the structures
 
of birds and beasts, insects and fish, of the way
plants grow, hoped that by 90 he’d have
penetrated to their essential nature.
 
And more, by 100, I will have reached the stage
where every dot, every mark I make will be
alive. You always loved that resolve, you’d repeat
 
joyfully—Hokusai’s utterance of faith
in work’s possibilities, its reward, that,
at 130, he’d perhaps have learned to draw.
 
Gail Mazur’s poems in Forbidden City  build an engaging meditative structure upon the elements of mortality and art, eloquently contemplating the relationship of art and life—and the dynamic possibilities of each in combination. At the collection’s heart is the poet’s long marriage to the artist Michael Mazur (1935–2009). A fascinating range of tone infuses the book—grieving, but clear-eyed rather than lugubrious, sometimes whimsical, even comical, and often exuberant. The note of pleasure, as in an old tradition enriched by transience, runs through the work, even in the final poem, “Grief,” where “our ravenous hold on the world” is a powerful central element.

For centuries, the stereotypical image of the voluptuous Italian woman has functioned as an object of desire for Western man: from sixteenth-century paintings of Venetian courtesans who modeled for the erotically charged canvases of Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, to nineteenth-century reports of the beautiful dancer Marie Taglioni, to the twentieth-century cinematic images of Sophia Loren and Dominique Sanda.

Now Italian women have turned the tables. With In the Forbidden City, translated from the Italian, acclaimed novelist Maria Rosa Cutrufelli brings together fourteen short erotic stories by contemporary Italian women writers. Well-established voices are juxtaposed with new ones; traditional forms provide a contrast with the experimental. In Sandra Petrignani's dialogue "Body" a women and a former lover engage in a heady debate about desire and indifference; Margherita Ciacobino delivers a tale of lesbian desire, a theme uncommon in Italian literature; Dacia Maraini writes on the literature of eroticism penned by women writers that ingeniously manages to be erotic in its own right; and Rossana Campo, in one of the most entertaining entries, offers a hip-rattling tri-logue on love voiced by some super-cool adolescents. In her introduction, Cutrufelli draws in even more writers such as Jean Baudrillard, Angela Carter, and Georges Bataille in her introductory essay on the theoretical issues of desire and seduction.

Now finally available to English readers, In the Forbidden City constitutes a breakthrough volume in literary erotica by Italian women that is both profound and engaging.