Between His Teeth, Clenched

Between His Teeth, Clenched is a haunting love story, both a novel and a poem, a sensual exploration of passion and the violence that possessing a body demands. Living past the end of his myth as a famed artist, Rafael leaves the city in favour of the seaside village of his past. There, he reclaims both the innocence of his youth and the friendship of the man that had once inhabited his body. But as he re-enters the frenzied state that has always allowed him to create, he finds himself severed from his own flesh. Rafael's fear of the process of creation gnaws at him, the way it demands a certain loss of the self consumes him. Every time he submits to his impulses, another part of him ends up seeping into the canvas. The bark of his thoughts is dulled only when he meets Julian, the son of the man whose thoughts Rafael had once inhabited. The young man encourages the clash of need with fury, leaving Rafael pushed up against the corners of his mind, merging with the landscape to which his body turns. The toothy waves and cliffs, against which one man tries to pulverise the other, take on the form of a corporeal canvas, buffing the lines between reality and impression, sense and senseless abandon. By turns feverish and tender, wretched and serene, Between His Teeth, Clenched is a stirring portrait of an artist recapturing his mind through the search for his body.