Under the Red Dress

As if guided by William Matthew’s “Love needs to be set alight again and again,” Pat Mottola’s physical and memorable poems cause us to remember people who might otherwise be forgotten. By describing women who wear red fish net stockings and men who buy them drinks, she reclaims ordinary lives by showing how people are all looking for some form of human contact. Particularly moving are poems about her mother who never “caught up to Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan” and her father who fought in WWII and “could not escape the stench of Auschwitz.” Throughout Under the Red Dress, Mottola’s love of her subjects darts in and out, slippery as the fish caught by her fishmonger, a Vietnam vet with PTSD. Pat Mottola’s poems will help keep the human fire alive as long as there is breath to sustain it because of her hard won knowledge that what will endure is the human heart and that love’s power can redeem even those returning from war in jungles and labeled “damaged goods.”    ~Vivian Shipley, author of The Poet and Perennial    These poems open with the sensuality of a rose. Mottola writes in “She Put Her Lies on the Table”: “Still / they spilled like last drops of wine / begging to be drunk, their breathless / bouquet  lusting for more;” and her readers will flush from pink to deep red under the influence of poems that sweetly whisper in your ear, breathlessly as in the best of erotica, or in a voice that could be christened as that of a 21st century Anais Nin. In the best of Pat Mottola’s poems, there is a quietude that often expresses a millennial loneliness that can be as sexy as a red dress—and as sheer. What a reader will find between the covers of Under a Red Dress is poetry that is sensually alive, and whose pulse quickens with the turn of each and every page.     ~Wally Swist, author of Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love    The woman in Under the Red Dress radiates a warm hunger through a voice whose words radiate in sharp, sensual images. She is at once a temptress and consoler, wry and sweet amid luminous secrets that “slink between the wrinkles / of your cleanest dirty sheets.” These are lines of “lipstick eternally smeared / after all those one-night stands.” Here thrives a gallery of lovers — successes and failures, alluring and pathetic, “those bad boys / who keep me coming back, a few to whom / I almost said I do…” Throughout, the image of a red dress appears both corporeal and spectral, all “because loneliness is quiet.” Like Anne Sexton, old fables are recast in erotic and plaintive evocations of Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and Cinderella, where “the Prince isn’t Charming / after he gets the girl.” These poems travel a wide ground, from bedroom to bar, from drive-in to a box of ancient photographs where family history lingers. Mottola’s first book is sweeping, heartfelt, and skillfully rendered.    ~Jeffrey Alfier, Founder and Co-editor, Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review