Lust Series by Stephanie Dickinson

The “lust” in the title of Stephanie Dickinson’s new book can better be understood broadly
as “hunger,” for want and need in various forms are enacted on page after page of this
intense, riveting kaleidoscope of short prose pieces that defy categorization as
genre. It’s as if the emotional urgency of the writing--Dickinson’s prose is more incandescent
than the poetry of most poets--burns away boundaries: whether she’s writing prose poems
or short-short stories or an extended poem or a novella or vignettes doesn’t matter in the
face of the reader’s moment-by-moment complete immersion in an indelibly portrayed
character’s perception of self and circumstances. Indeed, Dickinson does not interpret
experience so much as present it to the reader as a gift; her genius as a writer is to
create a sense of immediacy and “rawness” in what is nevertheless exquisitely crafted
and hewn. Art versus life? Here is the miracle of both at once. Nor do the boundaries
between only genres fall; in brilliant segment after brilliant segment, the borders prove to
be porous between past and present, male and female, human and animal, living and
dead, and urban and pastoral. The “I” daringly at times even seems to take on universal
dimensions, becoming a kind of appetitive life-force. Lust Series is therefore transgressive
writing at its best and recalls Cocteau’s definition of tact: knowing how far to go too far.
Sensuous, sensual, rhapsodic, dithyrambic, and phantasmagoric, this book, appropriately
for one so focused on hungers, invites a slow savoring as if it were a culinary feast, its
centerpiece the tension between one’s desire for others and the dangers others’ desires
pose to oneself. But first and last, the overriding hunger here is what Dickinson captures
in the phrase “crave of tongue”: although tongue hungers to lick and taste, it primarily
wants to make love to language, and this book is such a love-fest. Dickinson inhabits
language the way heat inhabits fire; wearing flame-retardant gloves might not be inappropriate
for reading this book by an author who deserves a wide audience that can never get
enough of her work.    Philip Dacey

Visceral.  Ecstatic.  Language shimmers beneath the pen Stephanie Dickinson hones to a blade,
wields like a knife: shank in the hands of the innocent prisoner who’s survived every enemy;
scalpel in the grasp of a surgeon who knows that to save is to excise the rot.  The immense
power infusing all of Dickinson’s work is that she writes like her life depends on it; she’s the
anointed girl “rambling from roof to roof sweating starlight,” giving voice to the runaway and
raped, the stalker and stalked, the imprisoned, kidnapped, deformed and deranged, nature
run riot, run rot.  She gives voice to the women taken in by the men “who talk a three-tier
wedding cake,” the little deer (who tells of her killer), “He unfleshes my bones and says that
he’s dressing me.” Dickinson’s heart is expansive, her empathy unbound as she embraces
the lives of both the innocent and their aggressors.  In this beautiful book, Stephanie Dickinson
masterfully gives witness to all of us finding ourselves at the mercy of our lusts.  Catherine Sasanov

Stephanie Dickinson

Stephanie Dickinson was raised in rural Iowa and has passed time in Wyoming, Oregon, Minnesota,
Texas, and Louisiana. She now lives in New York City. Along with Rob Cook, she publishes
and edits the new literary journal Skidrow Penthouse. Her novel, HALF GIRL, won the Hackney
Award (Birmingham-Southern) for best unpublished novel.