The Demon Lover

Rating:
Summary: A superb addition to personal or professional collections.
Review: Angelique Pagan's photographic images comprising The Demon Lover combine with her poetic, iconoclastic text to create memorable, striking, vivid, challenging commentaries on the female form and condition. These black and white visuals, clothed and unclothed are both stunning and original, showcasing a major photographic talent that transforms imagery into art, the commonplace into the extraordinary. Of special note are the quotes from a variety of people ranging from Henry Kissinger "Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There's too much fraternizing with the enemy." to Maxwell Bodenheim "...the simple feat of keeping her legs crossed was a structural impossibility." The Demon Lover is a superb addition to personal, professional, and academic photography collections.

Rating:
Summary: Demon Lover
Review: As a work of one woman's poetry and photographs, I found this book to be stunning. She expresses her emotion with a certain feline abandon for the stereotypical "let's see another photo erotic book designed for the unoriginal male voyeur." Instead, Angelique delivers erotic prose that reverse the role of women as the object of mans desire. As the reader, I felt SHE was the voyeur, not to be looked at, but looking at me. The photographs, all of her, subtly explore an unspoken relationship between her body as an object of desire, and her 'self' in her body with powerful desires. She looks back at the reader through her photographs and words which instead of saying "take me I'm yours", demand "I'll have you when I want to." For example she writes, "A black widow, briefly amused by a witless pawn...plays with her newfound toy, gets her sexual hit, and lights another cigarette." Not exactly the words of a woman playing into the wiles of the onlooker. Rather, the instinctually exercised animal behavior of leaving the reader feeling watched and played while she "circles and sniffs" her next victim.
A bold undertaking and a delightfully erotic experience.

Rating:
Summary: So -So
Review: Nobody told me this was going to be all the same pictures of the same woman, throughout the book. This is not a book for someone who is looking for a compilation of artistic and erotic photography from a variety of artists. The poetry is OK, the photography is mostly amateurish, and it's definitely not worth thirty some odd dollars. This would, at best, make a stunning gift for the author to give to personal friends as a gift, but it shouldn't be for sale on ... for the price they are asking.