Review by New York Times Review
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO kISSIng as a source of literary inspiration? You hardly read about it anymore (except in news accounts of it being nonconsensual). As editor of The New York Times's Modern Love column, I sift through some 8,000 personal essays about relationships every year. Almost none are about kissing. People will always kiss, I suppose, but these days it's an act that doesn't seem to generate much conversational traction. Except, that is, in "The Kiss: Intimacies From Writers," edited by Brian Türner, himself an essayist, as well as a poet and memoirist. In this anthology of essays and stories, lip-locking takes center stage - featuring such smoochy, no-nonsense titles as "Kiss," "Kiss, Kiss" and "Kiss, Kiss, Kiss." Befitting the brevity of the average mouth-on-mouth contact, most entries last only two or three pages. A few go on too long, making you want to twist free, while others tantalize with such grace that they linger sweetly in your mind for days. I was curious to discover what all of these meditations - prompted by the editor's call for "thoughts on a specific kiss" - would unearth. Would they focus on new love, where passion dominates? (I realized, diving in, that I probably kiss the top of my dog's snout more than any other surface, if only because he lets me.) I hoped it would explore vulnerability. A kiss, after all, is typically the first physical gesture in which we make plain our desire and open ourselves to rejection. Soon enough, the book went straight there. In "The Evolution of a Kiss," Nickole Brown describes this action as "a break in the dam separating two beings that agree, Yes, please touch me there. An insane gesture, at least on paper, to open up our most necessary and vulnerable aperture and surrender it to another, to give over that place with which we eat and speak and breathe." Yes, when you spell it out kissing can sound crazy and even repellent (and especially frightful for germophobes). Unlike sex, which ensures survival of the species, kissing doesn't seem to serve any obvious purpose. And as Tom Sleigh points out in his short essay "Judas Kiss," "kissing is far from universal: In fact, less than half of the world's cultures kiss for romantic purposes, and almost no animals." The book doesn't really explore why humans kiss, or why some of us do while others don't. But we do hear plenty about it being an urge, a compulsive act of affection, of love, of hello and goodbye. The most moving entries involve no romance at all, but rather familial bonds, and loss, and how with a kiss we seek to demonstrate the depths of devotion or grief when words fail. Dinty W. Moore manages to capture a lifetime of fraught family dynamics in his one-and-a-half-page micro-memoir about his absent, alcoholic father. "In my memory," he writes, "my father never once tucked me in, never once kissed me good night. ... And then one day - I was 16, maybe - as we said goodbye near his front doorway, I stretched up on my toes and kissed him_I can feel it still, the sharpness of the whiskers, the surprisingly soft skin underneath. I can feel, also, him not pulling back, but leaning in. He didn't live many years longer. I'm sure I kissed him a few more times. But that first kiss. I miss him, my dad. So damn much." And in the book's powerful final essay, Kathryn Miles muses about the meaning of farewell kisses after a man she loves leaves her, taking his two boys, demolishing their makeshift family. Wondering why she stills feels tied to something that has ceased to be, she writes: "I think maybe it's because we know on a molecular level that so few of our feelings die with a heartbeat, with a declaration, or even with a vanishing. And so we remain, hoping these feelings alone are strong enough to manifest a return." I wish the entire collection were as enjoyable to read as the entries above. Anthologies tend to be uneven by nature, but "The Kiss" isn't just inconsistent; it lacks any overarching design. Many entries seem unrelated to the theme of the collection until you get to the requisite kiss, and in some cases that kiss is so far afield that it feels shoehorned in: the kiss of a racquetball bruising one's eye, for example, or of lips to bong. Anthologies seem to come in two flavors. The first is organized to make a point about a certain subject, like how money affects relationships, and delivers a variety of deep dives - assigned to prevent repetition or irrelevance - that aim to lead us toward more comprehensive understanding. The second chums the water with a one-word prompt (essays on golf, say, or needlepoint), then casts its net into the literary ocean and publishes the scattered haul, whatever it may be. "The Kiss" falls under the latter category. Even so, pearls get poured onto the deck with the sturgeon. In one of my favorite passages, Adam Daiva talks about trying to describe a kiss in a novel he put up for workshop in which he says a person's lips were "warm and soft." His teacher, the writer Lorrie Moore, says: "Lips are never warm and soft, Adam. ... They are only ever chapped and spicy." In my experience, Moore is only half right. Every time I kiss my dog on the snout, it's so warm and soft I can hardly stop myself. Then again, I avoid the lips. ? With a kiss we demonstrate the depths of devotion or grief when words fail. DANIEL JONES is the editor of The Times's Modern Love column and the author of "Love Illuminated: Exploring Life's Most Mystifying Subject (With the Help of 50,000 Strangers)."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 4, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Turner, poet (Here, Bullet, 2005; Phantom Noise, 2010) and author of the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country (2014), asked the contributors to this anthology to write about a specific kiss. What results are magically varied pieces on kisses wanted and not, romantic and platonic, real and imagined, funny and sad, across time and Skype and heartbreak and death. Tea Obreht and Dan Sheehan have a conversation about their favorite cinematic kisses (sexiest, most romantic, and strangest). In one of several pieces featuring insentient kisses, with the smack of a racquetball hitting a wall just right, Steven Church recalls his father. Animals kiss, too, in Kristen Radtke's graphic essay remembering a tiny monkey who bestowed a prize upon lucky circus goers, and John Mauk's story about a woman finding a moment of connection with an errant bat passing through the restaurant she hates working in. It will come as no surprise to romantics that kisses never kissed are here, too, stored somewhere like damp gunpowder, like Benjamin Busch's decades-ago first crush. A chapter of kiss-related quotes from literature and a conversation between Turner and several contributors about writing intimate moments round out this already encompassing collection.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Memoirist and poet Turner (My Life as a Foreign Country) brings together the work of more than 50 writers to create an affecting and thorough exploration of a universal human gesture. Eschewing a simple recounting of romance and affection, the contributors explore a wide variety of kisses, including the perfect kiss of mutual magnetic attraction, the forced kiss of an unwanted advance, and the complicated parental peck on the cheek. The selections take the shape of letters, memoir, poems, dialogue, graphic narrative, and fiction. The book's greatest strength is the wide latitude the contributors are given in both content and tone. This opens the door for both a hilarious back-and-forth between Téa Obreht and Dan Sheehan on iconic screen kisses ("That's the strange beauty of the Pacino kiss, though: you never know what you're gonna get") and heartbreaking personal narratives, such as Laure-Anne Bosselaar's description of discovering an unfinished poem from her late partner, poet Kurt Brown, about "that kiss I failed to give you," which "will be the last of me to die." While not all the selections carry the same resonance, they come together into an emotionally complex experience that will make readers reevaluate a seemingly simple sign of affection. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
