My Dinner with Ron Jeremy

Described by some as erotica for feminists, and enemy to family values, DeColo’s poems convulse with desire and a longing for connection. Her work speaks to the particular loneliness of watching Fox News after you’ve masturbated too many times, depleted and filled with fascination and terror. Balancing tenderness with ferocity, cynicism with wonder, DeColo’s poems disrupt and reclaim misogynistic language, creating a lyricism that dazzles and swoons, hoping to leave a stain deep enough to last.

The poems in Kendra DeColo’s extraordinary second collection, My Dinner With Ron Jeremy, live in the sinuous space between want and propriety, fantasy and the ‘Must Be 18’ button on the poetry portal. There’s love here, too, and John Coltrane, and abandonment in all its necessary circumstances, but sex is both brilliant talisman and vacant harbinger through it all. This often humorous, always provocative book puts a neon backlight on the filaments between what we have, what we have to do, and what we wish we could do, whether we can rewind and watch it again or not. -Adrian Matejka, Author of The Big Smoke, a 2014 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Marvelous poetry … poems that would make great feature films. -Ron Jeremy, Actor

Sex-positive feminist verse… DeColo manages to coax beauty and meaning from the absurd aching morass of human existence. It’s not every writer who can emerge from these corners with anything approaching grace, much less deft and bracing poems such as these. -The Nashville Scene

[DeColo’s] work is ferocious and tender, demolishing patriarchal language and using the fragments to build riotous new worlds. -Bitch Magazine