AWAY with silks, away with lawn,
I’ll have no scenes or curtains drawn;
Give me my mistress as she is,
Dress’d in her nak’d simplicities:
For as my heart e’en so mine eye
Is won with flesh, not drapery.
—Robert Herrick

A lusty anthology featuring titillating odes by an array of libertine poets of the XVII and XVIII centuries (Robert  Herrick, John Donne, William Congreve, Thomas Campion, et al.)  The works include gentle celebrations of the female sex; witty & whimsical whispers designed to seduce; and urgent pleas of—in the words of André Breton—L’amour fou. In this surreal realm of ribald eros, Virginity is a lost cause and Sexual Pleasure reigns supreme.

Our edition is profusely illustrated —from maidenhead to toe!—with works by more than a dozen artists, including Édouard-Henri Avril, Vivant Denon, Amandine Doré, and Thomas Rowlandson. As volume 8 in the popular Pocket Erotica series, POEMS OF LUST & DESIRE makes a delicious stocking-stuffer for all the libertines on your holiday list.

illustration by André Collot

POEMS OF LUST & DESIRE
by Libertine Poets of the XVII and XVIII Centuries
Pocket Erotica  [№ 8 ]
Illustrated; 110 pp., $12
ISBN 978-1-7356159-8-1