A Bedroom Occupation: Love Elegies

“Tricky language about the sticky stuff: this is bedroom-and-beyond talk from the past master, the rake, the raider, the witty and lonely rider. Enjoy here a bard’s bodywork, least love’s locutions. You have never read such confessions. John Donne, meet Mark Scott.”—Alicia Ostriker

“Mark Scott is one of our finest American poets. And here is, I think, his most challenging work. From the first sentence of A Bedroom Occupation we are taken by a voice that is unsentimental and unafraid of the dark on a nighttime tour of solitude.”—Richard Rodriguez

Untangling the aftermath of gratified desire, Mark Scott’s melancholy, letter-like poems are not always easy, not always pleasant, but you’ll read him wide-eyed, laughing, identifying with the characters and the situations—unless you’ve never had lovers or friends:

Lewis, you tell me not to choose my freedom, a desolate heart, but to remain in delight
                with one woman. Too late; I moved out; I can’t retrieve
that message where you sent it: Lauren changed our code. And if I could, why should
                what works for our friend work for me? He seems happy,
says he’s comfortable (which reminds him he doesn’t have “the fuck-you money yet”).
                And he’s consistent, stable. But his waters don’t run deep.
Mine do—or so I’ve been told. “If that’s how you feel,” Lauren said, “you’d better
                move out.”

Mark Scott, author of Tactile Values, has appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002: Ninety Years of America’s Most Distinguished Verse Magazine. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where he teaches at the College of Saint Mary.