Your Salt On My Lips

by Liz Asch

Playful, explorative, taboo-smashing, and delectably liberating, Your Salt on My Lips is a mostly-queer collection of literary erotica that will leave you stimulated, satisfied, and yearning for more.

Coquettish or dominant, whimsical or down-and-dirty, Liz Asch explores love, lust, and play across the spectrum of sexuality—replete with orgies, personal discoveries, anachronous adventures, and hallucinatory spins at times amorous and passionate, wild, uninhibited, and unrequited.

As both an artist and author, Asch ascends beyond everyday erotica, dancing from prurient to poetic in thirty-five scintillating shorts that will stimulate so much more than just your sex drive.

192 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 14, 2021

About the author

LIZ ASCH is a writer, visual artist, and creative embodiment instructor. She holds a BA from Vassar, an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and a Masters in Chinese Medicine. Liz hosts Body Land Metaphor Medicine, a collection of surrealist guided visualizations you can listen to on your podcast apps. Liz writes literary erotica, lyric essays, poetry, meditations, and explorations on visual art. An intellectual sensualist, she believes in seeking new ways to grant ourselves permission to become who we are meant to be.

Reviews

[Savannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liz is a master of language and imagery and takes me places fully unexpected. I can't wait to get a physical copy of the book (several) and share with friends. We need more celebration of queer sexuality, play and joy.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved how many different queer voices and bodies and desires are represented in this collection. So hot. I especially enjoyed how consent is part of these fantasies. So well written and well worth your time.

[Casey Carpenter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection of queer erotica. Asch starts this collection with an epistolary story which feels like a call to action. She takes you from a love letter to a lemon, to queer nightclubs with bucking broncos, to a story that shows what healing sexual trauma can look like. Her stories are part erotica and part medicinal. The most captivating are the ones that speak directly to you, making you feel that you are in the room, so close it feels like the narrator's teeth are around your nipple. This collection, this “animal wail of pleasure” speaks to the sexiness of consent and will have you sliding in your seat.

[April Peveteaux · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daaaaaaaamn. These essays are hot, hot, hot and beautifully written. It's lovely to have such a literary take on erotica that is also all-inclusive.

[Isaiah · Rating 1 out of 5]

To see more reviews check out MI Book Reviews.

I got an ARC of this book from Cleis Press.

I both love and hate giving one star ratings. Sometimes books that are terrible get two or three stars, because they were so bad they were enjoyable. Then there are books that just really are not for me. The ones I enjoy writing one star reviews are the ones I have hate read. There is bad erotica, you know the stuff that is so wild and laughable that they become group events and drinking games. There there is erotica that you literally fall asleep while reading.

This book happens to fall into that second camp. The first few stories were ok, but then they just sort of went downhill from there. The first few I was able to laugh about and tease friends with the ideas, but as the book progressed it became clear that this just wasn’t erotic at all. A great deal of the stories were overwritten nonsense. The ones I enjoyed were laughably bad.

My favorite has to be one of the first stories, one of the really bad ones. The reason why it was bad was it was inconsistent, dangerous, and wild. So I was all for it. This was the exact sort of bad I enjoy. Erotica either needs to be over the top bad so it is fun or it has to be erotic. So I am not upset about the dildo rodeo story. Seriously. So the performers were competing for an unnamed prize by riding dildos attached to a mechanical bull at a lesbian bar. So that is dangerous in so many ways. I should not have to explain that you can be injured from rough penetration. The inconsistencies were what sold me on it though. It started with generic dildo riding by a woman. Then in the LESBIAN bar multiple gay men performed gymnastics and dance routines. I am so confused. I want to know the rules of this contest. This was the story that sticks with me after reading everything for so many reasons. If this were a cohesive book about this lesbian bar’s dildo riding contest, I would have be so into it. It would have been funny and ridiculous in a way that I enjoy.

Another story, I think it was the one right after the dildo riding contest was just gross. Polyam does not mean sleeping with everyone involved. The narrator fetishizes her bi boyfriend but making him a stereotype down to his clothes about how “gay” he was. She refers to her bi boyfriend’s wife as a “hot piece of ass” and then specifies that she wants the wife to be her best friend, lover, sister, AND mother. What? This story had condoms, but not for oral sex. The condom was out, but then she was like “no, it is teasing that I won’t put the condom on tehe”. Then every time the condom was mentioned or things like “microfucking” was said the less faith I had in the author’s ability to make an erotic story that was actually erotic.

By the time I was 25% in, I had fallen asleep on my kindle. Erotica generally doesn’t put me to sleep. The rest was just overwritten and over-stylized. There really isn’t anything else that I can say. This was not enjoyable and I am grumpy about it. Cleis press has been my standard of erotic and my go to when people ask me for erotica options. This does not match the standards that I have come to expect from Cleis. I kept trying to find a story that really stood out or would have been redeeming, but this really was not the collection for me.