Customer Reviews

Red Hot Lipstick

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This is a great collection of very sexy but also philosophical and disturbing stories by Jeremy Reed, author of the erotic classic The Pleasure Chateau. Many of these stories seem to me about creating representations of states of mind in which loss of self is possible, and thus certain sorts of fantasy engagements become possible. In a way, it is about the pain of "taking yourself with you" into the bedroom, and beyond the bedroom into the city and the night where sex is: about evading the otherness of the Other through abstraction. Here are a series of brilliant contrivances for the mind and other organs: but be careful---these pleasure villas are made more for critical reflection than masterbation.They hold sadness closeby and morn for other kinds of less provocative but more intimate and sustainable sexual possibilities.

For me, Reed is among the great writers of our fin de siecle and JG Ballard, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kathleen Raine, John Ashberry, David Gascoyne and the late James Merrill have all said so. Sadly, while Reed has a devoted following among our best writers, at present many ordinary readers still don't know his work. So if you are new to Reed's non-erotic output, here is a little bit about him.

Jeremy Reed has published more than 40 major works in under twenty years. He has written more than a dozen books of poetry, as many novels, and several volumes of literary criticism. Reed has also published important and respected translations of Montale, Cocteau, Nasrallah, Adonis, Bogary and Holderlin. His own work has been translated abroad in half a dozen languages. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including those of the National Poetry, Somerset Maugham, Eric Gregory, Ingram Merrill, and Royal Literary Funds. He has also won the Poetry Society's European Translation Prize. Reed's poetry displays a masterful light-fingered lyricism in which acute social observation and humour combine to create a public poetry in the tradition of Auden and Merrill. In other moods, Reed is a masterful observer of the specific details of passing strangers. As they move through the unmatched variety of London's daily procession, he engages them in moments of imaginative meeting, creating a private poetry of urban encounter whose affinities lie closest to Frank O'Hara and Baudelaire. In these poems, Reed allows his profound sympathy for others to form a bridge inward, a bridge sustained through arresting imagery, into the mains circuits of the world we share.

Very male, no feeling, no poetry