The opening poem, Bloody Murder, brings you into the spirit of Alan Catlin's appropriately named collection, Satan's Kiss. Each poem title a bar drink related to life stories he encountered during his extensive bartending career. Images hold and pull like from Tequila Sunset-his eyes are/hard as freeze-dried spit/glazed by a gale force wind. Catlin's style is narrative free verse with a heavy dose of hard times lived by hookers, vets, and the regulars, often people surviving on the edge. These poems capture the era and the reality of those days today. Catlin lays bare bitter truths in the human experience-simply stated, universally understood, and in the work humanity finds a window, sometimes a door as with the last poem. --Marc Swan, Today Can Take Your Breath Away
Catlin's remarkable collection of bar horror poems will make you rethink your next visit to the neighborhood watering hole. --Mickey J. Corrigan, author of All That Glitters and The Art of Bars
In Alan Catlin's new collection, Satan's Kiss, you will find a forgotten yearbook spread of the broken, a diary of America's lost, caught by the bartender's eye and left on the page with back alleys and dreams gone mad. As you read these poems you will pretend that this can't happen, that you never have seen this before, and that you don't know anyone like this. But then you remember, as you ask for an extra olive. --Scot Young, All Around Cowboy