Available as a book alone, illustrated with 31 black and white photographs, or with a CD-ROM designed by the author presenting excerpts in a series of gorgeous, poetic dreamscapes. The CD-ROM includes live audio and video performances of poems from the print version of the book, a gallery of the photographic images, a scrapbook of images used in making the performance videos, an author biography and excerpts from a video interview.

"1966: on my tiny teen phonograph I played the yellow Atco single, "When a Man Loves a Woman" till its grooves went faint, moved beyond words by it message of strength and passion through weakness and chains. Now Linda Smukler has re invented butch desire as a passionate amalgam of abjection, power and trembling knees. She knows the doubt and fear behind every stern visage the restless tugs of absence that surge beneath identity. Smukler is the Percy Sledge of lesbian butch femme. Cri-de-coeur écriture."

"There's a photograph in here that's hard to read at first. Then suddenly you see it's two, imposed on one another: portraits of Linda Smukler and Gertrude Stein. Stein hovers behind, above, beneath these brazen texts. Like her modernist forebear, Smukler uses the most direct and plain American idiom to render the complexity and anguish, and the humor of desire."

"The subject is sex--of these written things. I won't call them poems or prose, to tell you the truth I think it's secret speech gone public. Linda Smukler talks us through the rooms of sex, along telephone wires, to hotel rooms and rustic streets. And a terrifying absence looms alongside all its cagey fullness--the missed message, the desperation, the erratic fumblings towards orgasm or whatever. It's lesbian sex, lesbian speech, the bubbling details of a life lived and spoken, who has a job, is married, owns a dog, drinks juice and tea, drives a car and is utterly totally obsessed with sex. It's disturbingly true. If sex has a flag, this is it."

Linda Smukler's first book of poems, Normal Sex, was published in 1994 by Firebrand Books and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in poetry. She has received fellowships in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Astraea Foundation. She studied painting and film at Yale College and the Yale School of Art, and was a fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She received her M.A. in creative writing from The City College of New York. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and antholologies including Ploughshares, The American Voice, Semiotext(e) USA, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading, Women on Women III, The Zenith of Desire, My Lover Is a Woman: Contemporary Love Poems, The Arc of Love, and Best American Erotica: 1996. She is the co-editor with Susan Fox Rogers, of the forthcoming Portraits of Love (St. Martin's Press, 1997). She has also won the Katherine Anne Porter Short Fiction Award from Nimrod magazine.