A BEDROOM OCCUPATION

Mark Scott is one of our finest American poets. And here is, I think, his most challenging work. From the first sentence of A Bedroom Occupation we are taken by a voice that is unsentimental and unafraid of the dark on a nighttime tour of solitude.
—Richard Rodriguez

Tricky language about the sticky stuff: this is bedroom-and-beyond talk from the past master, the rake, the raider, the witty and lonely rider; a bard's body work, least love's locutions. You have never read such confidences. John Donne, meet Mark Scott.
—Alicia Ostriker

Scott’s A Bedroom Occupation sounds and is authentic and kept me enthralled. Molly Bloom sings along with his wonderful rhythms—a strange association but strong.
—Dore Ashton

Mark Scott has written a beautiful and terrifying book. Beautiful because he has both a reverence for and mastery of words that makes the act of reading a pleasure on par with eating (no higher praise from me), and terrifying because A BEDROOM OCCUPATION honestly answers that pillow-talk chestnut, 'What are you thinking?' with an honesty and rigor and humor and darkness not for the faint of heart. Is that afterglow or is the house on fire? Scott's work and writing have an almost narcotic power. I want to hear his voice.
—David Rakoff, author of DON'T GET TOO COMFORTABLE

True love? There may be such a thing. But truthful love? Ah. Now we’re talking scary. These letters from a self-described “faithless man” are intelligent, intimate, and illuminating.
—Molly Giles, author of Iron Shoes

The subtitle, “Love Elegies,” and the very look on the page of this carefully titrated series of two dozen amorous programs (somewhere between the seductive and the sermonical, their diction demotic, their temper short, their costume loose-fitting and ready for action) is a directive clue: we are in Horatian country, a disabused (because already abused) region of discourse extending from Tibullus and Propertius to Ovid and Juvenal. But though his first book of poems, Tactile Values, was redolent with discreet behaviors and quizzical sagesse, young Mark Scott pays no respects to the Roman erotic elegy so tellingly to be noted in his second: who ever overheard glossy Horace adjuring himself, as this argument runs, “How out in front of it can you be? That’s the real question. You can forget your conflict-avoidance and your business-models. / That’s all academic. This is the real world we’re talking, boots on the ground. . . . Save the lecture.” The words exchanged are bywords and passwords, anything but polite, though often bitterly juste: “Mars / has canals, they say. Well so the fuck does Venice, / and look at the Venetians. They’re drowning, sinking, getting muddy. The whole world is mud.” And these exchanges occur between a company of out-for-sex buddies and fair-weather girlfriends (Cynthia indeed, speaking of Propertius, and who in hell is Paul?) with occasional outtakes by Dickinson and Swift. Drôle de monde. But what can you call a world where the only knowledge is cracked or crooked, the only ignorance vulnerable or virulent? I call it comical, all right, even cynical, but the most heart-breaking love poetry since that other Empire fell.
—Richard Howard

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