{"product_id":"rising-venus","title":"Rising Venus","description":"With \u003cem\u003eRising Venus\u003c\/em\u003e Kelly Cherry reveals the fearsome beauty, vulnerability, and complexity of women's experience. Cherry masterfully re-creates the full spectrum of the female psyche, from looming madness to harrowing self-knowledge made bearable, even exhilarating, through the poet's remarkable range and skill.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe book's journey is an ascension from mysterious and overwhelming depths of despair and anguish to a place of peace and perspective. Beginning with \u003cem\u003eAdult Ed. 101: Basic Home Repair for Single Women\u003c\/em\u003e, Cherry asserts, \"\"Ladies, you are about to find out \/ just how much really rough \/ weather \/ your house can take.\"\" Probing the emotional extremes of woman's life as daughter, mother, wife, lover, and working woman, poems like \u003cem\u003eLady Macbeth on the Psych Ward\u003c\/em\u003e open a frightening chasm beneath the reader, yet steady and reassure with the bravura of poetic compression. That fearless art inhabits the role of \u003cem\u003eAn Other Woman\u003c\/em\u003e and then explores the status of woman as aesthetic object, whether of the male gaze, cultural perception, or her own observation: \"\"she sees the long-haired girl she used to be, \/ in boots and mini-dress, apart and watchful \/ as in a redoubt, in a room in a painting in \/ a room, or as if in a poem turned inside out\"\" (\u003cem\u003eThe Model Looks at Her Portrait: A Retrospective\u003c\/em\u003e).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA passionate turbulence gives way to acute and delicate observations on art and myth and strikingly original insights into tradition and context. Thus, in \u003cem\u003eSunrise\u003c\/em\u003e, \"\"A sky as blue as if it were \/ The backdrop for a Renaissance \/ View of the Ascension\"\" becomes a representation of that miracle, itself figured by the miracle of dawn, \"\"a morning \/ Risen from the night.\"\" The title poem revises the classic view of Venus to speak of another miraculous ascension, a woman's hard- earned rise into her own sense of self: \"\"Myth is the portal \/ through which we pass, \/ becoming human at last, \/ rising out of dream \/ and desire to realms \/ of reality, where love, \/ a woman, by Jove, \/ survives, strong and free, \/ engendering her own destiny.","brand":"Louisiana State University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55807360663896,"sku":"9780807127681","price":19.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780807127681_62d52505-c40f-4869-8389-2f311f385dbd.jpg?v=1778679066","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/rising-venus","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}