My Dinner with Ron Jeremy

"The poems in Kendra DeColo’s extraordinary second collection, My Dinner With Ron Jeremy, live in the sinuous space between want and propriety, fantasy and the 'Must Be 18' button on the poetry portal. Here, desire dictates every fetish and gesture, the uncomfortable performances we give to convince ourselves in bedrooms, drug stores, on webcam, or on the subway, ukulele in hand. There’s love here, too, and John Coltrane, and abandonment in all its necessary circumstances, but sex is both brilliant talisman and vacant harbinger through it all. This often humorous, always provocative book puts a neon backlight on the filaments between what we have, what we have to do, and what we wish we could do, whether we can rewind and watch it again or not. "—Adrian Matejka, Author of The Big Smoke, a 2014 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

"Marvelous poetry … poems that would make great feature films.”—Ron Jeremy, Actor

Described by some as “erotica for feminists,” and “enemy to family values,” DeColo’s poems convulse with desire and a longing for connection. Her work speaks to the particular loneliness of watching Fox News after you’ve masturbated too many times, depleted and filled with fascination and terror. Balancing tenderness with ferocity, cynicism with wonder, DeColo’s poems disrupt and reclaim misogynistic language, creating a lyricism that dazzles and swoons, hoping to leave a stain deep enough to last.
Kendra DeColo's first collection, Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014) was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.