Twenty Years
in Bed with
the Same Man

Poems

120 pages

6 x 8 inches

ISBN: 0-9631909-7-6

$12.00

This book is of eternal pertinent interest—tenacity in the days of tenuous lovelife. Long term relationship is a subject we don’t hear much of anymore. Who has even made it thus far to be able to write about it realistically and eloquently? The fifty poems in the collection move from the earliest “Taking Vows” through the challenges of “The Middles” into a section about not committing adultery and into the powerfully affirming “Reaching Across”. Finally there shines the sense of a voluptuous bond. These are not domestic elegies, but fierce and tender documents about what it truly takes to go the long haul. They possess a spiritual electricity gained from seeing clearly into the depths of love, something akin to the wild-eyed, erotic songs of India’s rebel saint Mirabai.

A collection of marriage poems written over the criss & cross of a long marriage—feel the knife-edge witness of desire, the hard grip and caress of affection transformed by the everyday clarity of relationship. Move from the impossible into the possible into the trembling rose connected to the solar plexus. Yes, one can either “cling to nothing” or dance, rave and marvel. Peer through that veil of destinies where partners watch each other eat breakfast. Who hasn’t touched these thoughts in the practice of love? Dear reader— there will never be a map, one simply wakes up to a new morning’s light.
—Jessica Allen

“These are the first love poems that ever made me want to write love poems. Their splendid power is contagious! Joan Logghe has given us a passionate, fragrant feast, a vast embrace. I love the wacky, wise humor of these poems best of all.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye

“Much of this sprightly collection deals with marriage, which Logghe views with wit, philosophy, and a dash of irreverence…Joan Logghe knows whereof she speaks, and she makes us feel the emotional roads that she has traveled. “
—Peter Thorpe

“These are poems of passion and anger, love and hate, understanding and misunderstanding, defiance and resolution all strung along the time line of an enduring marriage. Logghe has done more than hang her marital laundry out for everybody to see. She has touched it all with poetry in abundance and variety and with a generous heart to give it a life of its own.”
—Walter Howerton Jr

Born in Pittsburgh, PA, Joan Logghe has been an active part of New Mexico’s poetry renaissance for many years. She has been poetry editor for MOTHERING Magazine and received a National Endowment for the Arts in poetry. Her readings have taken her to Berkeley, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Vancouver, Telluride’s Talking Gourd and the Taos Poetry Circus. She is author of What Makes a Woman Beautiful, (Pennywhistle, Santa Fe, 1993), Sofia, La Alameda, Albuquerque, 2000). Work with the Santa Fe AIDS community has led her to form WRITE ACTION, a group of writers involved with AIDS activisms. Out of this work Logghe edited a collection, Catch Our Breath: Writing from the Heart of AIDS, Mariposa, Santa Fe, 1996. Besides ongoing workshops in Santa Fe, she has taught workshops at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu and Hollyhock on Cortes Island, B.C., Canada. Joan Logghe lives in La Puebla, New Mexico, where she is involved in community politics. She and her husband and live in the solar house they built themselves. Their three children still like to visit.