Ah, Men: New and Selected Poems

Why didn’t you come down for the curtain call? the speaker asks her young son after his flawed stage debut. After I dropped the flag, he said, I was afraid what the King’s soldiers would do to me. So does a child naively conflate theater and ‘real life.’ In this collection of witty, funny, and compassionate portraits, familiar and exotic, from the 1950s to the present day, Nancy Scott bears witness to how we all confuse ourselves with a sense of self we’ve evolved for the public stage—we males particularly, though the self-myths here piquantly, often poignantly depicted are not only male delusions of grandeur: whether motivated by appetite, desperation, or pure idiosyncrasy, Scott shows them to be our guises for outwitting, defending against, and consoling ourselves in an intimidating world. —Gregg Friedberg, author of Would You Be Made Whole? In Ah, Men, Nancy Scott wields her deft and light touch to wrestle with the truth of the matter, no holds barred, and comes up winning! This is a poignant and moving collection of poems. She writes powerfully, bringing the reader face to face with truths that might otherwise have remained submerged. Her poems are often startling, many of them taking the reader into heretofore unknown territory. The author’s unabashed honesty about herself, as well, rings true throughout the collection. It’s an eye-opener! —Judith McNally, author of CHOPPING without CHOPPING:Micrologues Opening Nancy Scott’s Ah, Men, I couldn’t put it down. The poems describe the author’s encounters with the opposite sex from girlhood on. Partially a memoir of past loves, which evokes the reader’s own, the poems share that power which Scott says, “broadened my life.” We also meet the émigré professor who recognizes Scott as the daughter of the man who twenty years earlier helped his fiancée escape from the Nazis; a PhD candidate called boy when travelling South in the ’50s; a Vietnam vet who declined a promotion dependent upon recruiting other black soldiers; a lover fifty years later who friends Scott on Facebook, and many more. Recognition, understanding, and humor are gifts to be found in Ah, Men. —Adele M. Bourne, author of A Grocery List