Rating: 
Summary: The Serpent Swallowing Its Own Tail
Review: What an amazing tome: a collection of short stories, prose-poems & letters that deals with the venomous lifebite of living & loving with too much feeling in a world that doesn't have enough. Each of these works is viciously brilliant & diverse, acerbic wit coupled with the despair of longing, dark subject matter illuminated by intelligent humor & observation. The short story "Allegory," for example, is clearly a first-person hallucinogenic tale of drug addiction, yet Catalyst never mentions a substance once. Instead, the bottom of his narrator's day-to-day "drops out"; that is, he finds himself in a dank cathedral, transmogrified to another nameless, faceless being stripped of everything but an insane longing.The prose-poem "Everybody's Big Exception" is a razor-sharp account of love disguised through the shallow validation of being sexually attractive to unavailable, terminally unconcerned straight men. And the pieces "Pained and Painted" and "Flouncing About" are the most concise and telling accounts of clubland's lip-glossy veneer I've ever read. Furthermore, most of these works are fraught with a turbo-charged sexuality like no other. There is no meaningless orgasmic encounter in these pieces, not even the ones that are presented as such. _Cottonmouth Kisses_ is a collection that is exactly that: Venomous, Predatory, & Protective in its vulnerability. All the pieces have their own cracking of the rattled-tip, their own turns. Most importantly, the collection as a whole is a contemporary account of experiencing extremes & coming full circle. I love & treasure this book.
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