If the title Darling, may I touch your pinkletink 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.
Lee, B.: - In 2005 John B. Lee was inducted as Poet Laureate of Brantford in perpetuity. The same year he received the distinction of being named Honourary Life Member of The Canadian Poetry Association and The Ontario Poetry Society. In 2007 he was made a member of the Chancellor's Circle of the President's Club of McMaster University and named first recipient of the Souwesto Award for his contribution to literature in his home region of southwestern Ontario and he was named winner of the inaugural Black Moss Press Souwesto Award for his contribution to the ethos of writing in Southwestern Ontario. In 2011 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Norfolk County (2011-14) and 2020 he was appointed the Poet Laureate of the CCLA Canada Cuba Literary Alliance. In 2015 Honourary Poet Laureate of Norfolk County for life and in 2017 he received a Canada 150 Medal from the Federal Government of Canada for his outstanding contribution to literary development both at home and abroad. A recipient of over eighty prestigious international awards for his writing he is winner of the $10,000 CBC Literary Award for Poetry, the only two time recipient of the People's Poetry Award, and 2006 winner of the inaugural Souwesto Orison Writing Award (University of Windsor). In 2007 he was named winner of the Winston Collins Award for Best Canadian Poem, an award he won again in 2012. He has well-over seventy books published to date and is the editor of seven anthologies including two best-selling works: That Sign of Perfection: poems and stories on the game of hockey; and Smaller Than God: words of spiritual longing. He co-edited a special issue of Windsor Review-Alice Munro: A Souwesto Celebration published in the fall of 2014. His work has appeared inter-nationally in over 500 publications, and has been translated into French, Spanish, Korean and Chinese. He has read his work in nations all over the world including South Africa, France, Korea, Cuba, Canada and the United States. He has received letters of praise from Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Australian Poet, Les Murray, and Senator Romeo Dallaire. Called the greatest living poet in English, by poet George Whipple, he lives in Port Dover, Ontario where he works as a full time author.
