In Madeleine Cravens’s debut collection, Pleasure Principle, the poem “Leaving” welcomes us, moving us through exit as a prelude to arrival. With a sophisticated command of technical elements, enhancing its thematic depth and emotional resonance, the enjambment constrains or sharply controls the reader. Cravens reminds us that we are in a theater of pleasure where the imminent is enjoyed only briefly, and this is reinvigorated anaphoric devices such as the repetition of phrases such as “not the pleasure of” providing a rhythmic anchor, providing a rhythmic anchor for what is central to the collection —pleasures and failures. Cravens’s diction is carefully chosen, emphasizing sensory and evocative language that brings abstract themes to vivid life. The irregular line lengths and lack of traditional stanza breaks contribute to unpredictability and disorientation, reflecting the tumultuous nature of leaving and arriving in new, unfamiliar landscapes. Cravens effectively captures the complexities and nuances of departure and arrival, inviting readers into a contemplative and immersive experience.
Not the pleasure of lovers but the pleasure of letters,
a pleasure like weather, delayed and prepared for,
not the pleasure of lessons but the pleasure of errors,
of nightmares, of actors in the black box of a theater,
not the pleasure of present but the pleasure of later…
The immediacy and urgency in Cravens’s work, through which she observes, as the poet rightly does, is highlighted in the musicality and the tensions that swell horizontally and vertically along the lines of the poems. The rapid concern in Cravens’s poems is the presence and absence of an aware self, which exists in the tiny portals sifted through time in small spaces, parties, or even on the streets of New York, Oakland, or San Francisco.
Everything happening to the queer body is happening in the backdrop of urbanism. In “Desire Lines,” Cravens says:
I left Brooklyn at twenty.
I fell in love for the first time. There was
an element of terror when she removed her rings.
I could be shaped, I could be changed,
I could see a future and be denied it—.
In his influential writings on urban modernity, Charles Baudelaire argues that pleasure is an inherent, inalienable fact of human experience that exists independently of its aesthetic or linguistic mediation. For Baudelaire, the artist’s task is not to create pleasure ex nihilo. Instead, it is to attune oneself to its ubiquitous, multivalent presence in the world, in doing so, to render it palpable, immediate, and new.
This notion of pleasure as a kind of ambient frequency, a signal that the artist-flaneur must learn to detect and amplify, finds powerful expression in Cravens’s “Desire Lines.” The poem’s title refers to the improvised pedestrian paths that crisscross urban parks, public spaces, and trails of foot-trodden grass that deviate from the prescribed routes of architects and planners. For Cravens, these desire lines serve as both literal landmarks and metaphorical conduits, material traces of the body’s unruly, improvisatory relationship to the built environment:
Olmsted meant for it to feel like this. Movement
toward action, no real completion or arrival.
Like how at your door, I wanted to be in your room.
In your room, I wanted to see inside your skin.
Your husband was away, in San Francisco.
Here, Cravens suggests that desire is always already inscribed in the urban landscape, a kind of erotics of space that exceeds and subverts the dictates of rational design. The poem directly converses with Michelle Hart’s novel, We Do What We Do In The Dark. In both books, the speaker’s longing for her lover is contiguous with the city’s libidinal energy, its endless deferral of “completion or arrival.” Pleasure, in this sense, is not something that neither Hart nor Cravens invents or imposes, but rather something they excavate, a pre-existing current that they channel and refract through the prism of their queer subjectivity.
This idea resonates powerfully with Baudelaire’s conception of the artist-flaneur as a kind of human seismograph. This figure wanders the city in pursuit of the “shock” and “intoxication” of modernity. In his famous essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire writes: “The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.”
For Baudelaire, the artist’s task is to immerse herself in the tumultuous, ever-shifting currents of urban life, to surrender to the “ebb and flow” of the crowd in pursuit of a kind of ecstatic self-dissolution. This is precisely the ethos that animates “Desire Lines,” with its headlong, paratactic syntax and its kaleidoscopic layering of urban imagery:
Another frantic September.
The arch meets the plaza. The plaza feeds
into the park. By the boathouse, Joe and I watch
two racoons pull a chicken wing from the trash.
The poem’s restless, staccato phrasing enacts the giddy delirium of the flaneur’s gaze, the way that the city’s disparate elements—architecture and debris, human and animal life—collide and converge in a kind of sensory overload. Pleasure here is not a stable or unitary phenomenon but a ceaseless process of collision and metamorphosis, a “fugitive and infinite” dance of matter and mind.
In this sense, “Desire Lines” can be read as a kind of ars poetica, a meditation on the nature of aesthetic experience in the context of urban modernity. For Cravens, as for Baudelaire, the poet’s vocation is not to transcend or escape the chaos of geography in which the poem places itself. It is to plunge more deeply into its maw, to find new ways of inhabiting and expressing its inexhaustible flux. Pleasure is not something that art creates from scratch. We unleash this vital force that courses through the very fabric of the modern metropolis. If nothing was in that state of nothingness, there is desire/pleasure or the yearning for aesthetics lurking somewhere in the void.
Across three sections of tightly-crafted poems, Cravens maps the contours of queer female desire, using the place as her anchor. From the parks and bridges of her native Brooklyn to the mountains of Lebanon, the California coast, and beyond, Cravens examines how physical and psychic geographies shape the self and one’s experience of love, sensuality, and heartbreak. As she writes in “Provincetown,” a poem set in the iconic queer enclave:
Rachel says I have a hungry ghost inside me.
That my generation doesn’t know our own history.
By the harbor, men walk together in muscular pairs
and for some reason all I think about is death—
Here, Cravens touches on the book’s central tensions: an insatiable yearning, a grasping for connection and meaning, against a backdrop of personal and collective loss, all existing in a busy landscape often interrupted by an unbothered urbanscape, which is overly present in Cravens’s work. The specter of an unnamed pandemonium haunts the poem, marked by surreal language that takes over. Here, the poet stops writing and starts documenting the bane of a city, its waters, the people, the corrupt, and the carrying of and through the rust —a load that the poet forever carries.
Perhaps Cravens cannot see beyond the blur of darkness that later saturates this poem. Or perhaps she is holding by the base the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre. For Sartre, this radical freedom is both a gift and a burden, a source of exhilaration and anguish. In his seminal work Being and Nothingness, he writes: “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.” This notion of the self as a perpetual project, an ongoing act of creation and responsibility, finds powerful expression in Cravens’s poetry, particularly in her writing of grief as an alternative to desire, counteracting as world-making and world-unmaking forces.
But Cravens also, within this busy landscape of poems falling in and out of love, creates a space for the erotic charges to be both livid and serving. In “Pleasure Principle,” the titular poem, Cravens captures the electric charge between new lovers with soaring precision:
After the party, Ellen choked me against the refrigerator.
It was very quiet. Other students filtered into the snow.
Can there be a story where a character wants nothing?
A moment of voyeuristic self-regard reveals vulnerability, a sense of the self-being reframed and reconfigured by this erotism that holds the reader in the first line of that poem. “Ellen choked me” is the poet’s report, but as already established, the action is always happening within a busy space where the poet can always escape if attempting to evade the tension and the reader. Cravens leaves us no other sound, not hers, but a certain quiet, which I imagine is heavy. In a similar moment in Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” they say: And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing / to surrender. Cravens frequently locates sex and sensuality in the physical world, weather, and water, and the poems argue about the inevitable.
“Beirut” is set in the Lebanese capital. The poem presents a fragmented and hallucinatory landscape, a city where the pursuit of pleasure is inextricable from the ever-present wraith of violence and loss. From the outset, Cravens establishes Beirut as a space of sensory overload and dislocation. The boundaries between public and private, interior and exterior, are constantly blurred and transgressed in this place. The speaker, an unnamed expatriate or traveler, observes the city from the liminal space of her balcony, a vantage point that affords her a kind of detached and voyeuristic perspective on the urban scene below:
Mornings, I watched groups of runners
from my balcony. A one-eyed cat roamed
the street below. My neighbors all had purple shutters
strung together with steel wire. I had one friend.
The juxtaposition of the “groups of runners” and the “one-eyed cat” suggests a kind of surreal and disjunctive urbanism, a city where the rhythms of everyday life are constantly interrupted by the intrusion of the uncanny or the grotesque. The “purple shutters / strung together with steel wire” become an objective correlative for the speaker’s sense of dislocation and estrangement, a reminder of the ways in which even the most intimate and domestic spaces are penetrated by the violence and instability of the world outside.
Outside the city, we found a mill abandoned
on a hillside, its thresher oxidized by mist.
A goat charged at us with bared teeth.
There was often the problem of electricity.
I bought a space heater and set it near
my bed, which stood on wooden
risers. At the edge, I waited. Then it
was winter, a word synonymous with rain.
I understood less of any language by the day.
When we pulled off the highway to walk
through the valley, I heard a young boy
singing, but saw only his mother.
Pleasure and danger are inextricable here; even pastoral scenes crackle with violence and risk. For Cravens, desire is urgent, unignorable, and worth pursuing to the point of destruction. The pastoral and the industrial, the natural and the man-made, collide in a kind of apocalyptic tableau —how even the most idyllic or secluded spaces are haunted by the specter of violence and decay.
The “oxidized” thresher and the charging goat become emblems of a primal and ungovernable force. This wildness lurks beneath the surface of even the most seemingly civilized or urbane landscapes. For Cravens, the political is not avoided. What is touchable is pleasurable, even a country and its politics, even the principles of government whose policies of eco-preservation affect the landscape which the book concerns itself with.
At the end of the collection, we have fully come to understand Cravens and her cravings, the predictable poetics of her hunger, her perception of city life, the melodrama happening at parties, the sex and the hand on the neck, the longing, and the departures, her hallucination, and other maladies. However, Cravens retells the entire book in the final poem, as if each page flipped is a scene on Broadway, the musicality of poetry watering us to the root. In “Creation Myth,” recants:
Because a hand came out and pushed down the land.
Because a boy tried to hold two dogs together.
Because you wrote her about it. You sent a letter.
Because peacocks made cat-like sounds in the mountains,
and someone knocked twice, three times, on a smooth wooden door
[…]
In this incantatory litany, Cravens asserts the primal power of desire itself. Desire is to have faith in transformation, in the perpetual possibility of rebirth. This is a stunning, exhilarating note to end on:
One can be alive again. One can be alive ten thousand times.
According to Cravens, we can exist in her open city masqueraded by a busy backdrop where we are animals of desire, loved to shreds, or abandoned in the bay. Cravens, in her world, offers us the chance to come again and rewrite it as the author of our existence.
Madeleine Cravens has written an electrifying debut, a book that feels intensely personal and thrillingly cosmic in scope. Her poems are psalms and counterparts, fever dreams and field notes; glimpses of a self in glorious flux. Pleasure Principles expands how we can map a life through language—through the changing coordinates of love, loss, desire, and place. It’s a powerhouse of a book that announces Cravens as a major new voice in American poetry.
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