Poet Muse

by Sasha Nudél From Sasha Nudel — Ukraine-born poet, speech-language pathologist, certified fitness trainer. She writes, she has said, for every woman who has been made to feel that her sensuality is too much, too raw, too honest — and who needs someone to say otherwise. Find her on Instagram @a.mouthful.of.scribbles. "Poet Muse" is a collection of erotic and romantic poetry written unapologetically from the female gaze. Its territory is love and desire in their most specific, embodied, immediate forms: the charged space between two people, the way wanting lives in the body before it lives in language, the particular intelligence of a woman who knows exactly what she wants and finds poetry the only form precise enough to say it. Each poem is short, sensory, and immediate — the kind of writing that reads aloud well, that lands somewhere in the chest before the mind has time to catch up. The register is sensuous and direct, often playful, sometimes quietly devastating, always honest. This is not poetry about desire as metaphor or love as abstraction. It is poetry about the actual, physical, emotionally risky experience of being in a body that wants things — and about the particular freedom of a woman who has decided to stop apologizing for that. Readers of Nudel's previous collection described her work as "witty, playful, eloquent, sexy, imaginative, clever, passionate and affectionate" — and noted that the "complex expression and skilled innuendos evoke such longing and intense feeling." More than one reader has reported reading these poems aloud to a partner. More than one has called it a book every woman in their life needs her own copy of. The authorial identity underneath this work is not incidental. A speech-language pathologist studies how the body produces and receives language — how sound becomes meaning, how meaning moves between people. A fitness trainer lives in the body's capabilities and limits. A poet who is both of those things brings a particular kind of literacy to desire: not just emotional but physical, not just expressive but precise. Nudel knows exactly where language and the body meet. Poet Muse is what happens when a writer decides to live in that intersection. Perfect for: -Readers who loved Rupi Kaur's The Sun and Her Flowers (sensual sections) or Nikita Gill and want something more fully centered in erotic and romantic female experience -Fans of Anaïs Nin, Anne Sexton, or Ada Limón who want contemporary poetry in the same lineage of women writing honestly about the body and desire -Anyone looking for sensual poetry to read aloud — to a partner, to themselves, or just because some writing wants a voice -The reader who has been told her desire is too much and needs a poet who will tell her it isn't -Gift buyers looking for something genuinely beautiful, a little provocative, and likely to be received as intimate and personal rather than generic