Product Description

Edgy and ironic, Clint Catalyst exposes the underside of all his many subjects - gay relationships, backwater adolescence, and spiraling addiction. Whether he's writing about a chance sexual encounter at a Goth club called Lilith ("Some New Kind of Kick") or revealing the inner thoughts of young hustlers in Hollywood ("Metaphor, and Remorse"), Catalyst unearths the trashy truth in his characters' unconventional lives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #95606 in Books
• Published on: 2000
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 158 pages

Review
"Catalyst is a master of language and metaphor: he slams you right into uncomfortable situations and doesn't let you out." -- San Francisco Bay Guardian

"Catalyst mixes delicious realism with velveteen imagery, a toxic cocktail which hits like a punch in a pumped-out stomach." -- Skin Two magazine

"Clint Catalyst has the magical knack for turning the most ethereal thoughts and feelings into tangible imagery." -- Anthony Kiedis, Red Hot Chili Peppers

"Clint Catalyst's Cottonmouth Kisses walks on the literary wild side. Well-tuned and surprisingly insightful... Recommended." -- Gay Times (UK)

"Complex, multiplex... it's got terrific octane... make no mistake about it: He's got talent in spades." -- Bellingham Herald

Customer Reviews

"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!

kodak moments from hell
I've been reading Clint since he was an imprisoned resident of a small Arkansas town and admired every word he put down on paper - or whatever it was he wrote on. I only say prisoner because I've heard the horror stories a small religious/KKK town can produce. Fortunately for us, he escaped.

Clint can take a mundane situation, (though in his world the mundanes are few and far between) and using his powerfully artistic words, turn even the simplest event into a kodak moment from hell. The book's range of emotions, sheer boredom to absolute terror, innocent love to brutally ecstatic rape, uncertainty, yet cocky as all hell attitude allow the person reading his individual pieces to be right there beside him at every incident, observing and feeling. Clint scrutinizes unnoticed and sees all the absurdities in life that most people wouldn't give a second thought to. He has a unique way of seeing the glass neither half full nor half empty but either overflowing with some seedy liquid or dry as a bone, shattering at any moment into itchy sand particles.

I don't know where he finds his words or exactly how he puts them together to create such (well, I won't say beautiful although beauty IS in the eye...) narratives but I hope his fairy tales never go away. I recommend this book to all of you who have survived, or are still trying hard to. And I look forward to what this brutally honest writer has for us in his future never-never land.

A glass gothly
Catalyst's fiction, poetry, and biographical wisps are full of bright honesty and toxic rides. Using threads from such writers as Poppy Z. Brite and Dennis Cooper, he weaves through a bevy of subjects, mostly dark and possibly degenerate. I thoroughly loved his story "Taking Care of", and was entertained by most of the book. I felt he sometimes succumbed to mediocrity, but it's evident the potency he has which struggles to be realized in this burgeoning collection.