A collection of stories signed by brilliant authors depicting the many languages of love, desire, and seduction, Kink edited by R.O.Kwon and Garth Greenwell has the effect of taking you out of the comfort zone, bringing you in a no man´s land that you get to know oh, so well, only to be left on yourself, with all the doubts, new longings and impossible desires.
For me, the common denominator of most of the stories is the excitement of the unfulfilled desires. Once accomplished is either the end of the story - the life story - or turns into dead boredom, aggressive desire to break up, instant hunger for another desire, this time even harder to reach. Although it rejects ´reductive ideas of normalcy and aberrance´, the distances between our solitudes bridged by desires is the norm. There is more the distance, the absence of bodies which matter. The presence is an impurity, a scenario turned bad, an alteration of the desire. It kills intimacy when it happens.
According to the introduction, Kink is understood as ´a complex, psychologically rich act of communication. Kink in these stories is a way of processing trauma, and also of processing joy, of expressing tenderness and cruelty and affection and play´.
The mental map of desire traced through the stories - my favorites are signed by Carmen Maria Machado, Melissa Febos, Alexander Chee, Larissa Pham, R.O.Kwon, among others - makes you - or at least made me - think in a completely new way relationships, sex dynamics and body interaction. It is a complex phenomenon taking place particularly when one - me - tries to read the stories very slowly, one by one, in order to allow the brain enough time for processing the new information. Settling only for a short break, before being literally assaulted with new data and emotional challenges.
It was worth waiting for getting the book, for finishing the book, for writing about the book. Stages of the mind, a small game of intellectual desire.
Rating: 4 stars
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