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O In Mouth, Genevieve Neuville Kohlhardt

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The poems in O in Mouth are concerned with pleasure and guilt, self and other, form and transgression, orgasms and the weight of the moments after. They focus on orality in poetry and in sex, locating the mouth as the site of all these concerns.

Much of this book is written in dialogue with other texts, including Shakespeare’s sonnets, Dante's Vita Nuova, Helene Cixous's "The Newly Born Woman," as well as many others, including some of Pablo Neruda’s love poems. While reading representations of eros, I was excited by the passion and desire felt by the lovers; yet I …