Seduction: Out of Eden

Collaborations between great jazz musicians yield thrilling results, allowing us to hear music in new, original ways that open us to new places in ourselves. This is how Seduction: Out of Eden works. I don't know of another collaboration in poetry where each poet is willing to subsume his or her own ego and voice into another's so different from their own. The entwining creates a thrilling new persona. Each let go of their own voice to create something that will make us hear an old music new, the birth of an extraordinary voice intoxicated with language, a complex river of words, that while deadly serious, and barely pausing for breath, still gives us a little wink from the banks. Praise be!

Mary Stewart Hammond, author of Out of Canaan and Entering History, both from WW. Norton



The poems in Seduction: Out of Eden carve new ways to reassemble and conceptualize the story of creation and Eden. They deconstruct its familiarity and recreate it in textures of words, surprising and rhythmical, that gather into unexpected images. They turn this well-known tale into a more vivid, experiential, and even sensual one that can only be grasped in the unique ways poetry offers. The Eden that is revealed is an erroneous paradise, one that could have failed us all.

Gili Haimovich, author of Promised Lands (Finishing Line, 2020), winner of the colori dell'anima and the Ossi di Seppia poetry competitions (2020, 2019)



"And why not / topple illusion: a paradise cautionary and erroneous," wonders Seduction: Out of Eden, a chapbook in which poets and co-authors Jaclyn Piudik and Janet R. Kirchheimer imaginatively recast the creation story from the Book of Genesis. With linguistic dazzle and invention, these lyric poems impart an awareness of language's resonance and depth, how its "savage grandeur" and "seconds of eureka burn." In this spellbinding "glossary of becoming," Piudik and Kirchheimer "bleed a bouquet into being" in order to revise the tale of creation through Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Diction here is detonated with witty erudition to show a world transformed into "God's bling."

Yerra Sugarman, author of Aunt Bird