Poems for the Pornographer's Daughter

Robin Chamberlain is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

John B. Lee’s powerful and beautiful poems ask us to reconsider our
ideas about eros, gender, and society. Even when exploring taboo
subjects like the erotic experiences of children (“to think that we
were not sexual is to lie”), Lee is never salacious or coy. Rather, he
writes in straightforward but evocative language, inviting readers into
the scene and allowing them to decide for themselves what it means.

Lee’s poems show the immense gap between commodified sexuality that
is forced to be sleazy and individual discoveries of eroticism that tend
to come under censure. Reading these poems, one senses and participates
in the author’s acknowledgement that sex is (or can be) both beautiful
and powerful in potentially dangerous ways.

One of the collection’s highlights is the prose poem “The Girls’
Door,” which ranges from the tragic (“‘She likes it,’ he says /
But we cannot tell for her weeping”), to the comical (the author’s
disappointment at reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover), to the sadly
indignant (“I wonder now at the rituals of my own culture / where we
must learn in the hay mow and the corn / field and the crawl space what
it means to be human”).