Sexy Imaginings

by Becky Thompson

The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens, and Other Poems on Aging, Zack Rogow, Valley Press, Woodend, The Crescent, Scarborough, YO11 2PW, United Kingdom, 2026, 72 pages, $15.00 USD, www.valleypressuk.com.

IN HIS BOOK, Research is Ceremony, Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson talks about laughter as a way that Indigenous people scare away danger. The prolific poet and translator, Zack Rogow's latest book, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens also sees humor as the fascia of life as it holds the human body and its many wonders and frailties together. Rogow's book is one that insists itself on top of books on the bedside dresser for its midnight laughter and morning instructions for living awake and open to the world.

In "Where are They Now?" Rogow offers eighteen stanzas about world luminaries—Plato, Lao Tzu, George Washington Carver, and others, catching us up to where they might be now. For the Buddha he writes: "Buddha is working anonymously at a famous chocolate maker / in Paris, trying to determine if he may have overstated the case / when he said, 'All life is suffering.'" Like his long-time friend June Jordan, Rogow embraces Buddha's questioning spirit while worrying about the sidelining of joy; both Jordan and Rogow model how learned irreverence can sustain us. This is a plumbline in The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens, as Rogow walks us through how we might still make love without "turning the vine" and other upside-down partner poses. In the title poem for the book Rogow explains, "…even if you can't anymore, / there are more types of passion / than peaks in the Himalayas" as he also gives new ideas for sexy imaginings.

The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens is a characteristically worldly book as Rogow takes us from Central Park to the Rialto Bridge in Venice, to Missolonghi, Greece, to a gas station in Oregon, sometimes with a lover, sometimes not, always with sexuality as his wished-for companion. Kama Sutra is a gutsy book written in a culture that trades in Botox and age denial. Rogow offers us the melancholy and kindness of age, the ironies and mostly unsaid realities:

BLESS THE DOCTORS

These days I have more doctors than friends.

and

MILESTONE

You reach a point in your life

where you hope you'll be outlived

by your car.

In a shape poem, Zack Rogow's new hips are lineated as words in the design of a walker. And, I laughed out loud (in the middle of the night) as I read Rogow's "Senior's Dating Site Profile" beginning with "We all have baggage; I hope yours has wheels."

In The Kama Sutra's "PICKING UP THE PIECES" section, you will find a wistful Rogow, reminding his now ex-wife that before the "…unnumbered nights / when we lay side by side / meticulously avoiding all touch" there were days when we left "grinning sunflowers" for a hotel clerk who found an afternoon room for hot lovers. and years when we found "new ways to braid our limbs / till I felt my soul had a twin" (from "Short Stay: To My Ex").

And in The Kama Sutra's, "THE HAND OF AGING," you will find the vulnerable Rogow we know from some of his earlier work as he confesses: "I have no role model for aging: / my mother and father left at intermission" (from "I Don't Know How to Grow Old"). And we encounter the wise Rogow willing to give imagery to the mysteries of the human psyche, why, for example, we wait, plan, rehearse, and fantasize about a perfect performance or a long yearned for tryst only to arrive and want to run. In "Bird in Flight," Rogow illuminates a quintessential moment in Charlie Parker's life when upon looking at the "string orchestra assembled to record behind him— / the curvaceous violins / the Steinway grand / shiny as a ball gown…" Parker walked right out the door, admitting only ten days later that it was just too beautiful for him to stay. Rogow asks a profound question: why it is so hard to sit at the center of beauty, to feel deeply the moments when we have fully arrived?

Again in The Kama Sutra, we find Rogow's quick wit and sage meanderings in the face of unknowingness: "Seconds, minutes, hours, days: / clocks have the hungriest jaws. / Days, weeks, months, years: / life has no clickable Pause" (page 26). Years ago, I remember the poet Carl Phillips telling a listening crowd that he tries to read a few hours each morning and write when the words come. I imagine Zack Rogow does some version of that as well, along with traveling and translating other poets, as he knows that winking keeps the eyes alive, and where the eyes go, the body often follows. The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens is a delicious, yearning, funny book for your nightstand, and to carry where love and loss take you.

Becky Thompson is a poet, scholar, yogi, activist, and co-editor of This Unruly Witness: June Jordan's Legacy. She is the author of Zero is the Whole I Fall into at Night, poems; To Speak in Salt, poems; Teaching with Tenderness: Toward an Embodied Practice, A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep: A Multiracial View of Women's Eating Problems, and other books. She has taught at China Women's University, Women's International Partnership for Peace and Justice in Thailand, and currently, she teaches social justice and poetry at Simmons University, Boston. In the wee hours, she writes music and plays the electric guitar. She can be reached at beckythompsonyoga.com.