From Literary Review of Canada:
 
“I've chosen ‘Carrots’ from Lorna Crozier's 1985 The Sex Lives of Vegetables—though really I am choosing the whole sequence of 17 short poems. Whenever the sequence comes up in conversation, women will slide their eyes toward each other, laugh and murmur, ‘oh, the carrot one...’
The sequence is memorable mainly for the startling rightness of its imagery. Once the connection between an unshelled pea pod and a firmly shut clitoris is made, it is permanent. A carrot may be fairly obvious as a phallic symbol, but the anxious thrusting into a giant, absent-minded earth makes you laugh. Crozier revives the ancient poetic technique of personifying the natural world with cheerful freshness. Our human preoccupation with sexuality is projected on the mindless fecundity of plants, poking fun at our perceived place in the universe.
During the 1970s and into the early ’80s, the big voices in the poetry tent were male, still pegged down by names like Layton and Cohen. The League of Canadian Poets had gone though an acrimonious convulsion in the creation of a feminist caucus. ‘Carrots’ and its sister poems emerge from that period as a confident, witty, female take on sexuality, as frank as anything Irving Layton wrote. Neither strident nor defensive, it is embracingly human.”
 
- Alice Majors, Literary Review of Canada, Vol. 16, No. 3, April 2008
               
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

Above: Canadian poet Lorna Crozier