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Portrait in Mustard by Wendy Allen

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Wendy Allen's Portrait in Mustard celebrates sex and pleasure, whilst registering the risks of intimacy for straight women in a world where men's pleasure often comes first. Via the unabashed tones of mustard yellow and metaphors of fruit and art, Allen's poems create a manifesto for women's independence, autonomy and joy. These are explicit, honest poems which embrace sex as an integral part of relationships and love. Sex is posed here as an experience that needs to be reclaimed by women trained to be polite and put the needs of others before their own. In recurring poems about fruit, Allen recalls sexual pleasure while considering loss, the body, trust, and betrayal. Portrait in Mustard delights in the intimacy of the memory recalled. There is no hiding or questioning the validity of sex on the page, where Allen is not so much confessing as delighting in a sculpturally proud sequence of poems. While Allen's speaker is sexually confident and full of unbridled laughter, Portrait in Mustard also emphasises the risk of intimate relationships for women. There's the lover who doesn't turn up in 'Service Station' or the partner in 'Pleasure Yourself While I Watch' who cares only about his own gratification and not his lover's. These are the stakes, so while Allen's poems are shamelessly erotic, they are also a reclaiming of power and autonomy for women.

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