Three Diamonds

In the avowed tradition of The Age of Light (1934), Man Ray's book of autobiographical photographs, Gerard Malanga presents a topography of his own life in verse and photograph. This great poet of observation charts his life in and around New York City with snapshots (poetic and photographic) of the female form as seen and desired. An epigraph explains the title and captures the tone of sexual voyeurism that pervades the volume:The thighs start wider apart fromeach other, causing a larger crotch-gap inthe female and an inward slope to the thighsthat often leads to an almost knock-kneedappearance. -- delineation of the three diamondsMalanga acknowledges and defends the nature of his gaze, writing in the afterward that the poems and images in Three Diamonds "make manifest those sexual observations insofar as they are a legitimate and poetic license of the world of appearances, the world of voyeurism and risk. Reality is, after all, just that which is seen, just as long as it is or can be seen, if one knows how, and is the evidence in the way these poems occur in the world."