I was just reading Jasper Bernes’s thoughtful post about The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel today, and while I’ve only read through the first section of the anthology, I wanted to respond anyway.

My first response is wonderful whether the book is really “about sex” the way Jasper seems to interpret it. I think of my own two poems (“Rough Trade” and “Housewives”), both occupying the first section, which are sexual in certain ways but not, I hope, about sex. To me, they are “about” power, politics, economics, and gender. “Rough Trade” could actually be said to be more about the color blue than about sex. The word “blue” appears more times than any sexual content. “Trapdoor Fucking Exit” by Andrew Mister didn’t seem to have much sex in it either, and it also didn’t even seem “sexual.”

I wonder, then, if the cover or the “aesthetic” of No Tell Motel colors the reception of the work in strange ways. Or, if sex is perhaps the last great metaphor for all things. It is, after all, so many things so many people…