Kirjahaku

Imagine you are given the startling news that your body is only capable of having six more orgasms. "It's either buck up or fuck up", decides Mel in "Six Degrees of Altered Sensation", adding this new restraint to the perplexity of single life with progressive Multiple Sclerosis. In "Flickering" Francis becomes a pyromaniac in order to give her grown sons the opportunity to become heroes. Mundane directions for propane use parallel a brief sizzling affair in "Dick & Jane & the Barbecue and No, It's Not a Love Story". Altered and twisted realities make the impossible possible for Clark's characters. Lillian, an arthritic senior in "Solitaire" discovers the rejuvenating properties of the bones of her lively, young new neighbour. Looming dementia is replaced by ravenous desire. In "Split Ends" a woman finds a book that contains her own memories, but it is written by a stranger with the same name; in "No U's" a woman slips away through the mail slot to escape her stagnant life.Ranging from micro-fiction to near maxi-fiction, the stories in "Attemptations" are peopled by women, often physically challenged women - darkly humorous, feisty, sexy, manic, persevering, observant, contemplative women. These characters will snag you and hold you there until they are good and ready.

Kim Clark believes that before multiple sclerosis began its insidious infiltration, there was no writing in her. That somehow the damaging changes that shut down certain functions in her brain also opened up other unused areas that housed a secret love affair with language and all its possibilities, its delicious sights and sounds and intimations. The poems in Sit You Waiting are not about disease, but about everyday occurrences that have allowed Clark the luxury of contemplation through compulsory inertia and altered perceptions. They vary in form and texture while maintaining a musicality, a sense of playfulness within the words that carries you from BC's beaches to Australia's Nullarbor Plain, from the neighbourhood pub to the cemetery, from pot roast country to the passport office places where breakfast/ doesn't matter/ any more/ than the notion/ of romance. Light and darkness can be found here. They are woven through the rhythm and rhyme of the erotic lips abandoned, the humorous self-propelled breasts, the thought-provoking murmuration of starlings, and the distressing edge of pale comatose. Come in. Sit down. Wet your whistle.

When Melanie Farrell visits the neurologist and is told she has multiple sclerosis she isn't surprised by the diagnosis. What does shock her is the related prognosis. It seems, based on a new study, that she only has six orgasms left. Six Fortyish and single, Mel must decide how best to spend, save or at least not waste those precious orgasms. Mel's plans to make the most of her sex life proves easier said than done when other realities of living with MS demand even more of her attention. Should she max out her credit card on an experimental procedure in Costa Rica? How can she work to financially support herself and get the care she needs when she can hardly leave the house? Where are her friends when she needs them? Her choices become even more confusing when one day she meets a man who loves butterflies and is good with his hands. Is this the man of her dreams? Is romance what she's really looking for right now? Or is she looking for something even more? Funny, honest, heartbreaking and hopeful, A One-Handed Novel offers a fresh take on independence and disability, ambition and love, and the communities that help us cope when our bodies and our desires are ever-changing.