Description

Synapse Flies into Startle

The Orgasm Book

by Sally Naylor

Sally Naylor leads us through an unabashed journey on the nature of orgasm. Prepare for your synapses to be startled. And delighted.

Enjoy a video of Sally reading from the book:

Sally Naylor — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (April 2021)

About the Author

A three-legged stool, Sally Naylor is poet, therapist & teacher, Sally, studied with Campbell McGrath in the FIU MFA program; she thrived in classes with Maxine Kumin, Gerald Stern, Ilya Kaminsky & Tony Hoagland.  Sally is associate editor of SOFLOPOJO, teaches community workshops for the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, writes memoir as well as text and workbooks for neophytes & now offers Zoomshops for emerging poets.

Below is a cento from the manuscript by way of a concise introduction:

Bold, unrepentant, ready: a kind of ginger, myth buster & koan mistress,
rogue, free & holy skeptic, all snake hips & hiss, hyperbole’s own gadfly,
one quirky mechanic tuning the orgasmic     how her hymns buzz.

For more information about her classes visit her website at: www.writer’scatapult.com

Early Praise for Synapse Flies into Startle:

An honest, uninhibited, brave exploration of those intimate moments when we are most vulnerable, most powerful, most bestial, most human, most alone, most united, most selfish, most generous, most profane, most sacred…told with wit, deep insight, delightful quirkiness, and profound sensitivity. It speaks to our most mysterious and unexplored common denominator. A book to savor!

—Lynda Pinto Torres

This feverish collection of poems interweaves sexual gymnastics with the poet’s verbal foreplay in such a way that we are tossed in dizzying intoxication from mattress to mattress of her poetic aspirations. Sally Naylor’s poems offer expansive meanings of the wondrous miracle of orgasm through numerous imaginative “sallies,” such as “sonic apostles of fine crystal,” “high riddles,” “green whistles,” “trip wires & trampolines,”— to name just a few definitions you will not find in the dictionary. This is a book where the world of the body and the body of poetry merge. For example, Naylor reveals the method to her madness in the appropriately titled, CURRICULUM VITAE, where “she tosses the confetti of an animated diction/ & peppers it with a school-girl dereliction.” In other pieces we find ourselves “electric, galvanized, kinetic,” amidst the inventions of her language. Hyper-hyphenated teasers include “raven-winged offerings,” “hill-top yowls” and “god-self darlings.” The sheer seduction of these poems leaves us, in Rumi’s words, “pulled from one fire—” and “pushed into another.”

—Deborah DeNicola

Sally Naylor’s Synapse Flies into Startle:The Orgasm Book is a rap, a hoot, a song; it’s the Fourth of July of love-making in words for flesh and lust. One does not read these poems, one revels in them. Naylor’s free-fall and ramped-up romp in the haymaking of sex, love, not-love, almost love, some love, lovers, losers, orgasm and faked orgasms, scintillates with rhythmic, gyrating lines, and images of hypnotic synaptic firings in the brain and groin. These poems are not for the faint of heart or bashful. Naylor’s honesty is unnerving, without inhibitions, no stop signs. They’ll set your hair, loins and heart on fire.

—Lenny DellaRocca

Sally Naylor’s poetry has always been, in her own words, “polysyllabic,” but her “zig-zag . . . smart-ass libido” does special “loop de loops” in this particular tour de force, exploring orgasms and the search for the mythical G-spot of poetry. It makes me want to close my blinds, hunker down, and well, you can imagine the rest. As Sally says, “Get woke.” Read this book: you’re not likely to ever forget it.

—Barbra Nightingale, author of Alphalexia