A raunchy, spiky take on how poetry can teach us to have better sex, dispensing pleasure and provocation in equal measure.

“Poetry is sex’s best translator,” writes Anahid Nersessian in this witty, provocative tour through the history of erotic verse. If poetry is uniquely able to capture the intricacies (and indelicacies) of sex, then it stands to reason that it can teach us a thing or two about how to have it better—while also shedding light on the state of our sexual psyches today.

How to Have Sex in a Poem begins with a startling premise: Sex is everywhere in contemporary poetry, but positive depictions of it are few and far between. It’s critiqued, not celebrated—and while it may be fair to say our sexual lives and politics are often lacking, this only identifies the problem. Nersessian turns to a rich (and often blush-worthy) countertradition of erotic poetry that revels in sex of all kinds —dirty, anonymous, polymorphous—without ignoring its pitfalls. Beginning with a Sumerian priestess’s ecstatic depictions of orgasm, this book introduces us to the work of a Chinese courtesan who flaunts the freedoms of her trade, a Welsh bard who composes odes to her “quim,” and an earl who writes of how “Signior Dildo” took London by storm. It explores how Milton cataloged the sex lives of angels, and shows how Shakespeare’s use of indirection created the template for contemporary love poetry. It also vindicates the work of modern poets like Bernadette Mayer who defiantly ignored the conventions of what sex in verse is supposed to look like. The result is a manual in the form of a polemic, one that shows us how we can read and imagine our way to better sex.