Oh, Touch Me There: Love Sonnets

by Roger Armbrust

Overview

There is a mythic quality to the poetry of Roger Armbrust.  Whether his subject is surgery or angels, his language and vision—while expressed in an earthly lexicon—are focused on the life of the spirit.

We constantly heal each other, love, true
to our senses, sharing our secret vaults
of fear and longing, faith and confusion,
doubt and delight.

Armbrust’s love poems are not ethereal, however, but rooted in real bodies…

My poetry honors your architecture’s mystery.

Fanciful, yet rooted in real experience, Armbrust’s  one hundred-plus sonnets incite passion and introspection, so that the collection makes an inspired lover’s gift.

 

“Armbrust’s contemporary sonnets plunge righ to the core of both the matter and the reader.”    —Raymond Hammond, Editor, The New York Quarterly

There is a mythic quality to the poetry of Roger Armbrust.  Whether his subject is surgery or angels, his language and vision—while expressed in an earthly lexicon—are focused on the life of the spirit.

We constantly heal each other, love, true
to our senses, sharing our secret vaults
of fear and longing, faith and confusion,
doubt and delight.

Armbrust’s love poems are not ethereal, however, but rooted in real bodies…

My poetry honors your architecture’s mystery.

Fanciful, yet rooted in real experience, Armbrust’s  one hundred-plus sonnets incite passion and introspection, so that the collection makes an inspired lover’s gift.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781624910067
Publisher:	Parkhurst Brothers Publishers Inc
Publication date:	10/01/2013
Edition description:	1
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	15 - 18 Years

About the Author

Roger Armbrust was national news editor of NYC’s Back Stage magazine, taught writing at NYU, edited books on national social issues, and fathered a remarkable artist.  He currently serves as co-curator of the online journal The Clyde Fitch Report: The nexus of arts and politics. His other books of poetry include How to Survive and The Aesthetic Astronaut.

Editorial Reviews

“Armbrust’s contemporary sonnets plunge righ to the core of both the matter and the reader.”    —Raymond Hammond, Editor, The New York Quarterly

From the Publisher

"Whether Armbrust’s subject is surgery or angels, his language and vision—while expressed in an earthly lexicon—are focused on the life of the spirit.  Armbrust’s love poems are not ethereal, however, but rooted in real experience, Armbrust’s one hundred-plus sonnets incite passion and introspection, so that the collection makes an inspired lover’s gift."

The New York Quarterly - Raymond Hammond

This stylish galaxy of love sonnets could only be crafted by a poet who has won and lost at love many times and co-habited with love’s ghosts for long periods, enabling him to acquire first-hand knowledge of “the feeling of stars dancing,” as he puts it in one of these 14-liners. To this poet, sexual love equals spiritual love, and spiritual love is nothing less than boundless, arising out of the most unlikely earth-bound circumstances and stretching into the “swirling liquid sums of the universe.” As Armbrust writes: “It doesn’t take much for each/gesture to create a universe…” Armbrust’s is book worth reading many times.

Birch Brook Press www.birchbrookpress.info - Tom Tolnay

Rhapsodic and radiant, visceral and incandescent, Roger Armbrust revels in the sonnet; he crafts his fourteen lines until they achieve rhythmic fluidity. The sublime musicality of his ear is everywhere on display, and his use of assonances such as “horns of Asian water ox—notched” strikes the listening reader as not only surprising but inevitable. Like Shakespeare’s dark lady, Armbrust addresses a mysterious “love.” Whether in the poet’s bed, Manhattan’s Union Square, Aix-En Provence, or at Earth’s core-mantle of 4,000 degrees Celsius, each view is a marvel of intimacy. In Oh, Touch Me There the subject matter ranges wildly from the cedar waxwing to the “soft, pink chickpea” of “Clitoris.” Armbrust dares to echo not only Shakespeare in his masterful iambic pentameter but Catullus in the grittiness that explodes lustily from his pen. This is gorgeous, explosive poetry.

Skidrow Penthouse - Stephanie Dickinson