Armed Love

Eleanor Lerman’s first book of poetry is an astonishing accomplishment. Hallucinatory, yet intimately in touch with their sources, her poems focus on homosexuality and insanity, cruelty and degradation, bitterness and terror, in a Manhattan demimonde where people react to each other in violent need because they no longer have any choice or even want a choice, accepting, embracing a survival beyond desire, beyond reason. The dramatic contrast between the poet’s quite elegant line and the sordid world of which she writes, between the mirroring coruscations of her images and the tortured complexity from which they spring, creates a nightmare vision at once reminiscent of the French decadents and of hard rock.