Pleasure Principle Poems

An astonishing debut collection of poems about desire and the chaos of youth.

In her stunning debut collection, Madeleine Cravens explores desire in all its transgressive power and wildness. Pleasure and pain are inextricable in these carefully observed poems, capturing a young woman on the threshold of adulthood as she seeks to understand herself. With a hard-edged vulnerability and singularly bold style, Cravens is unsparing about the struggle to make sense of one’s longings.

Taking us from the parks and plazas of Brooklyn to the freeways of California, these poems allow us to watch a life unfold where “womanhood felt like an incorrect container,” and love is performed “in the historic way, with bartering and harsh alliances.” As Cravens casts her questioning eye across the possibilities of queer relationships and the curious shapes of family bonds—both the ones we’re born into and the ones we choose—she urges readers to consider how we become ourselves.

Moving, captivating, and funny, Pleasure Principle heralds the arrival of a fearless and vibrant new voice in American poetry.

Madeleine Cravens was a 2022–2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She received her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Max Ritvo Poetry Fellow. She was the first-place winner of Narrative Magazine’s 2021 Poetry Contest and 2020 30 Below Contest, and a finalist for the 2022 James Hearst Poetry Prize. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and The Washington Square Review. She was raised in Brooklyn and lives in Oakland. Pleasure Principle is her debut poetry collection.