IT’S HERE! IT’S HERE! IT’S HERE!
The first of The Poetry Question’s 2021 Chapbook Contest winners has finally arrived! It is SEXYTIME by Lynne Schmidt!
SexyTime – Lynn(e) Schmidt
Lynne Schmidt tiptoes us into their new chapbook, SexyTime, tries to “convince myself the strands of hair in your bed / are all mine,” but by the end of the first poem we know what’s coming– lust and hope and betrayal and desire. Schmidt tells us what they want: “I do not want you to be gentle with my heart. / I want you to make it burst.” But still she holds back, teases the reader, pulls them deeper into the poems. These poems sizzle against your tongue, these poems leave you aching for more, these poems seduce.
~ Courtney LeBlanc, author of Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart (Riot in Your Throat, 2021)
As the title of their chapbook suggests, Lynne Schmidt’s SexyTime is a slow seduction, wrought with the same tension as watching a lover undress in dim lighting. And what is perhaps the most provocative about the collection is the way that it reclaims pleasure, rewrites an intimate past that has been shadowed by violence. In the poem “Treasure Maps,” Schmidt writes, “He offers small sacrifices, / skin under nails, messy hair, / bed sheets stripped in the morning,” taking images that may be associated with sexual violence and transforming them into symbols of joy and mutual bliss. SexyTime is metamorphic, a lesson in reconnecting with our own bodies after trauma, and how we may then experience desire without fear, without abandon.
– Taylor Byas, author of Bloodwarm (Variant Lit, 2021)