Books Cottonmouth Kisses
Digital Life Clint Catalyst Average Rating:

Rating: - Buy This Book!
After reading Cottonmouth Kisses I found myself in awe of the sheer richness of Clint's language. His command of both poetry and prose is astounding and refreshing indeed. His honesty and unpretentious approach to the recording of his own experiences is a gift to his reader. Whether Clint is writing about drug addiction, sex, friendship, or love, the sheer energy of his personality shines through in every piece. The combination of rage, passion, sorrow, and humor that animates this book is something to behold and reading it was like being taken on a ride where every turn promised something new. A truly wonderful collection of writing. Moving, engaging, and always on the mark.

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Rating: - The Serpent Swallowing Its Own Tail
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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Rating: - "So 15 minutes ahead it hurts!"
Mouth-watering! Catalyst lives up to his name, candidly plunging his reader/victim into lethal accounts of feverish boy lust, middle-Americana , gritty drug-sex, and the peril of Gen-X relationships with dragonfly-wit. For those initiates, Cottonmouth Kisses is an eye-opener- an absolute required text from a venerated voice of the San Francisco underground scene. For that "been-there, done-that" audience, this collection of poems and prose should resonate with genuine laughter and remorse, sighs of remembrance, and an unsynthetic frankness. Pieces like "Everbody's Big Exception," and "Panhandled Presence," (almost criminal without the inflection and intonation from Clint's live readings) are carefully intermingled with prose/poem passages whose allusions range from 70's sitcoms and K-tel to Jean Genet, from Coil and Siouxsie to Plato and Donatello's David. The result is a humorous, insighftul, and well-crafted collection of work from a brother who survived to tell the tale. A millennial tour de force!

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Rating: - i grew up with clint cataslyst
having know clint since his high school days and living in the same arkansas town as he did-i have to say i really enjoyed his book--it brought back a lot of memories-and i think, helped me to understand why i've chose some of the paths i've taken in life-i always knew clint would end up with some really bizarre stories-like we say in jonesboro-only clint!!