Sex At Noon Taxes: Poems (Walt Whitman Award)

The Story

Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, SEX AT NOON TAXES playfully invades the traditional territories of poetry and throws into question form, subject matter, and the sound and meaning of words. The poems mix straightforward narrative, midwestern vernacular, and linguistic ambivalence, embedded in which is a struggle between the mind and the body. These fourteen-line poems look for release in descriptions of physical acts and in intricate manipulations of language. Sometimes they find it but, more often, the questions they pose resist answers. Gender identification blurs as the poems probe theories of articulation and investigate the geographies of language and love. Through wordplay and word work, these poems travel a tightly crafted sphere of emotions and ideas.