Steam-cleaning love

by Jane Eaton Hamilton

Steam-Cleaning Love, J. A. Hamilton's second book of poetry revives the angry, biting, funny, loving, randy voice that won readers for Body Rain (1991). Women and women's bodies remain central; Hamilton's passion for both stirs her language to a visceral music of heart, breast and bone. But Hamilton's anger, still palpable, now occupies a more celebratory space. In these poems, grained with betrayal, loneliness, fear and hesitation, love is a strange, unwieldy and thoroughly marvelous creature; its songs are oh-la-light-hearted as often as they are blue. Wistful and wild, silly and sensuous, here is another argument in Hamilton's deep heart logic.