What Cisneros brings to that evolving body of literature is a sharp tongue, a lively wit and refreshing candor. Only a poet of Cisneros' caliber can get away with such wild juxtapositions of diction and imagery. The authenticity and individuality of the voice quickly make the familiar new and interesting: 'Dark wine reminds me of you./ The burgundies and cabernets./ The tang and thrum and hiss/ that spiral like Egyptian silk,/ blood bit from a lip, black/ smoke from a cigarette.'

'Vino Tinto,' for example, begins with the not-so-unusual metaphor comparing the lover to wine. Yet it is always poetic, founded upon vivid imagery, subtle rhythm and musical sounds. Exquisite in its simplicity, her voice draws from her native Spanish, from bedroom banter, and occasionally from the gutter. Not only is Cisneros' content bold, but her use of language is equally refreshing. She knows she's not truly being taken: 'I let myself be taken./This power is my gift to you.' She may not need a man any more than a fish needs a bicycle, but when she wants a man, she expresses her desire, and acts on it. Typical of this spirit is the poem, 'You Like to Give and Watch Me My Pleasure.' The speaker tells her lover: 'Take for the taking what is yours.' She urges him, 'Descend like rain,/ destroy like fire/ if you choose to.' She in return might 'rise like a huracan' or 'erupt as sudden as/ a coup d'etat of trumpets,/ the sleepless eye of ocean,/ a sky of black urracas.' This is a woman unafraid to abandon herself to lusty love, to loving lust. She speaks for, and calls out to, women who love themselves enough to love, both soulfully and bodily, men who are brave enough to love back.

In short, Cisneros puts feminism in a black lace bra and velvet spikes. The woman speaking these poems, presumably Cisneros herself, wants 'to be taken over the threshold and over/the knee.' She wants to be 'lullabied and crooned to' but also wants 'Your body./My body.Ours/ swallowing each other/whole.' In 'Loose Woman,' poet Sandra Cisneros dares to make no distinction between the two emotions. It has been said - far too often - that women love and men lust. 'Loose Woman' by Sandra Cisneros Knopf, $16.

Loose woman poems