$15.95
ISBN 1551521458
available through
Amazon
Reviewed by William Dean
03/10/04
I start to work against her hand and she lays her other one on my back. "Don't," she says quietly. I obey her with a sob. "Good," she whispers and tickles at my clit some more. She does it lazily, like sorghum molasses, and I give up, moaning against her skin.
It starts to rain outside. I can't come. I just want to orgasm, to blow apart, to be done with it. But she doesn't let me. She rubs her fingers across me until I surrender any last hope of this being about sex.
And that, in a nutshell, sums up Hot + Bothered's latest incarnation, #4. Or rather, to paraphrase, it's not just about sex. As Karen Tulchinsky reminds us in her Introduction: "As in the earlier editions of Hot + Bothered, this is not a book of erotica. This is a book on desire."
While we can rationalize and spin and lump together all we want, in the end we have to agree that erotica and desire can be two distinct things. Desire can bother. Desire can get you hot. Desire can be evoked by the graphic and by the subtle. There is more than sufficient "hot" in this anthology, but it is sometimes tempered by the "bother," too.
"Bother" is an ephemeral feeling, difficult to define. It's that faint glow of otherness and the inexperienced that tugs us along, never quite concluding or resolving; probing and dancing away like a lover we saw fleetingly and strangely hunger for against all reason. Because of desire.
No, it's not just about sex, but about wanting. The poignancy of Giovanna Capone's story "Rock Bottom" is realistically painful to those of us who've been there, felt that.
"I hate life," she yells at me. "I hate this fucking life." She pounds her pillow with a fist.
"You hate life? Do you hate me?"
"No!"
"Do you hate what we have?"
"I love us," she says clearly.
"Well, then, shit, Nicki. Get some help. You're drinking your life away. Goddammit. I love you, but what am I supposed to do?" I shout through my tears. "You keep putting me in this position because you know I love you. And I do. But doesn't that count for anything? Doesn't it make a difference?"
"It does," she says, drifting off to sleep. "It really does." As a writer and editor myself, I know how difficult it is to condense such powerful, ephemeral emotions into so few pages. The limitations of writing short short fiction compress the writer's eloquence, and each tale is finely faceted like a jewel ready to be set in your mind. Some sparkle and gleam quietly, others geyser up and can scald your heart with their power and understanding. I guess that's what Hot + Bothered really means.
The names of some of the authors will be quite familiar to readers of lesbian fiction: Carol Queen, Tamai Kobayashi, Shani Mootoo, and Donna Allegra. Other tales are by writers published for the first time, who show real promise of works yet to come.
