Wanton Textiles
by Reb Livingston & Ravi Shankar
Publication Date: October 2, 2006
42 pages
Available as FREE eBooks (PDF)
What People are Saying about Wanton Textiles:
"Wanton Textiles is a very satisfying collaboration to read, a salubrious interaction to experience. It's worth pursuing -- the poems will harden you as much as they will soften you and it won't matter which because these poems also want you to feel as many ways as possible of being unraveled towards ecstatic release."
— Eileen Tabios at Galatea Resurrects, read entire review here.
"The themes behind many of these thoughts came to life while reading Reb Livingston & Ravi Shankar’s delightful chapbook “Wanton Textiles,” which is a series of clever, poetic communications between possible lovers or simply long-time Internet friends. Below the surface, however, I dare say “Wanton Textiles” is a convincing paradigm of current-day relationships – love in the days of long-distance commuting and Internet romances, where passion is exhibited via sexual innuendos transmitted real time through broadband connections and Windows-enabled PDAs. It seems the new foreplay of our generation. . . .
. . . "Wanton Textiles” is indeed a satisfying romp through the psychological and primordial landscape of modern love, accentuated by separation that continuously fuels passionate longing. But even more than this, most importantly, “Wanton Textiles” is a highly enjoyable work read after read. Every page entertains, pleases, and impresses! It is a joy!"
— Michael Parker at MiPoesias, read entire review here
"I imagine that if Regis and Kelly were ever to emcee at a Dadaist poetry festival, this is what they would say to the crowd of spools and yarn."
— Roger Pao at Asian-American Poetry, read entire review here
"This collaboration between two poets has the immediacy of reading someone else's heated e-mail exchanges, but with a heightened imagination and lyricism you would generally not expect in an e-mail. The two poets playfully employ sensual imagery and undercut this with unexpected comedy."
— Jeannine Hall Gailey, read entire review here
What the Authors are Saying about Wanton Textiles:
"A tour-de-force that channels D.H. Lawrence and the Happy Hooker, basting together bawdy pun with epistemological speculation."
— Ravi Shankar
"Pornography for your underpants."
— Reb Livingston
from Wanton Textiles
Reb, multitudinous seal-like forms on the lawn revealed themselves to be tarps covering holes, for what purpose I could not ascertain, not even after sitting momentarily in a bulldozer, grinning. Perhaps if I was possessed of clairolfaction, which a static-ridden talking head assured me equates to psychic smelling, I might have sensed the cancerous elm overhanging the hole was in fact budding new leaves, in one sightless spot. But I had to get back to the underventilated building, so nothing jangled my nose. Now I’ll never know. The Raven * * * Mr. No Jangle, never trust an Anglo-Saxon name and now you know and accept that you’ll never know – enjoy the immeasurable progress and remember, all holes are shame lairs and climbing in risks never emerging. Another hole: the circumstances leading up to waking wrapped in a drafty four-armed sweater in a champagne bar called THE BUBBLE HUBBLE. A sweater built for two? I’ll never care to know. Salvation in obliviousness? Please Jesus. In this city where snowfall is extraordinarily rare, I thought I saw my double, but she looked nothing like me and soon I forgot and then I remembered if faced the other direction eventually there would be a familiar abode that I would always know and so begins the foot voyage. In beautiful pinching stilettos. Mangled and Broken-Toed, Reb * * * Let’s rather stretch together, sky, breasts, silhouettes, our own recognizable heads unnumbered and damp upon the grass asking for once, twice, thrice, why count why wretch, why not bind our thighs around our pathos and like CBs buzz: “From here I banish your zipper and all your senseless buttons. There are neither worms nor snakes between the blades. These fingers are a massage, a sublime massage.”
