Darling, may I touch your pinkletink

If the title is a serious question, (and it is), then every human in possession of a pinkletink (and that is everyone) might cry out touché in celebration of the way we are touched by these poems. Like the one who wields the sharp-tipped rapier, or the blunt-tipped epee, Lee is something of a fencing master as he seeks and finds the mot juste for both anatomy and soul in celebration of both lust and loving. Thrust and parry, touch and counter-touch, give and receive, reveal and perceive, to give permission and to withhold consent, all we do in this loving dance is here in these amazing erotic poems. Like the audience that thrilled to hear Chuck Berry's double entendre when he sang the words to "My Dingaling," we all know what it means to be cagey when it comes to our own sexuality. And there's mirth in the perilous exploration of sexuality. Deep down we recognize the physical needs that wake us naked in the night, naked as the day we were born, and down where the spirit meets the bone, we find a longing for a loving connection to the self and through that self to the other, the one who is acquiescent to our most secret and most sacred desire. The Gilgamesh poet, the Songs of Solomon poet, Sappho, Catullus, the young John Donne, Robert Herrick, the list is long, and it's long overdue for another Canadian poet to celebrate the body, to remove the fig leaf from the secrets of Eve, and to find there an awakening as it was with the first delicious taste of the fruit that hung ripe and beckoning on the branch in the orchard of Eden. If there's a better book anywhere that captures what it means to be young and curious, to pass through the temptations of adolescence, to emerge unscathed and to live within the healthy libido of a mutually loving couple, and from there to pass into the land our parents knew, I haven't read it. This book joins the essential texts, the ones we cannot do without. Let John B. Lee touch your pinkletink. You won't regret it.